You may have noticed a slowing down in the production of birds lately. That’s because these last few are so much more complicated than the earlier ones. With the first few birds, I could easily churn one out over a couple of evenings, but these later ones need a lot more concentration to make sure…
(Ok, so Tartankiwi calls it a cormorant, but I’m a New Zealander – it’s a shag :-)) This one went so much better than the kestrel – all the seams lined up first time. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to make one of the birds blue, seeing as I’m using a blue background, but…
Because I couldn’t quite make up my mind what fabrics to use for the next bird, this afternoon I laid out all the ones I’ve done so far, hoping seeing the overall effect would help me decide. It’s the first time I’ve actually looked at them all together, and they look pretty impressive: They also…
I unpicked the seam on the kestrel, and very very carefully lined the two halves back up, and pinned and basted it, and checked again that the crucial part of the wing matched properly, and sewed the seam… and it still doesn’t quite line up. So that’s it. I’m giving up and accepting the fact…
I haven’t been posting in-progress pictures of the birds, because the birds themselves are kind of an in-progress for the quilt itself, but I had to post this one, just to show you how complicated they’re starting to get now: Yeah, all those individual pieces (including the two at the top I haven’t done yet)…
The birds are definitely getting harder as we go along. Getting all the sections to line up properly on the swallow was hard work (and, although you can’t really tell in the finished square, I didn’t entirely succeed), especially that final seam. And this is only the half-way point! I suspect the final few birds…
Terrible lighting, sorry – I took the photo late last night after my second attempt at sewing the final seam (the first one I managed to misalign just enough to look terrible, so I had to unpick it (so many tiny tiny stitches!) and start again), and my attempt at colour correction of the artificial…
I decided to use this weekend to skip ahead a bit in the In Flight quilt-along, in an attempt to have the whole thing finished a few weeks ahead of schedule, and avoid that nasty clash with the start of semester. Having not participated in a quilt-along before, I’m not sure what the ettiquette is…
I decided to stick with the totally random scrappiness for the next bird, the swift, and I think it looks ok: It’s funny, as I was choosing which bundle of fabric to use for it, I found myself reasoning that I should use the bundles with the smallest number of fabrics in them for these…
This is the second time I’ve written this post. This morning I wrote a long (and, of course, incredibly witty and entertaining) version of it, but when I hit publish WordPress just laughed at me and ate it. And I didn’t have time to re-write it straight away, because I had to run off and…