Three Little Birds

One of the blogs I've been reading pretty regularly for several years now is "Attic 24," written by a lovely British mom.  She used to create fabric pictures,which is why I started following her, but now she's heavily into crochet (something that's never really clicked with me).  She has a way of choosing and combining colors that is very inspiring, as well as a funny, witty way of writing (you can just hear her accent coming through), so I always enjoy stopping by to see what's new with her.  A while back, she posted some birds she had made using a round crochet pattern that was simply folded in half and stuffed, with a beak and wings added later.  Then she altered the pattern to include a tail.  She has many samples of these on her blog (see them here and here).

In the spring I thought I might try to make a similar bird out of fabric and finally got around to playing around with a few designs last month.  The first is shown at the top, made out of a lovely scrap of quilted brocade I had in my stash (above).  As Bugs Bunny would say, "he's a little inny-skay in the elly-bay" so I tried again, going for a halloween crow this time.

 Better, but still too skinny.   I did enjoy spending a little extra time doing some hand embroidery on the wings, though.  

At this point, I altered the pattern to make the body really round and full.  Here it is below.

For this one, I used some happy Christmas flannel and red burlap.  He's looking much plumper, now and will make a cute tree decoration.

I decided to make one more, this time piecing a third fabric for the breast and making the tail match the wings.  I added some lavender with the polyfil stuffing, so he even smells nice.  Maybe I'll put hanging strings on them, like Lucy did, so I can hang them here and there around the house.  The girls are already claiming them for their bedrooms.

I was having so much fun pulling out a oodles of fabrics and ribbons (on top of a table that was already messy) so until today, my creative space looked like this!:

 There were still summer remnants here, including beach-tumbled rocks and sweet 16 party leftovers!  I spent the morning in here tidying up, and now there are only a few remaining piles left to deal with.

Now maybe I'll be more motivated to work on something inspired by our vacation on Cape Cod Bay.  I like the fabrics I selected for the water here, and have a seashell fragment and piece of driftwood that will stand in as a sailboat, but I'm not thrilled with the way the sand looks.  I'm not happy with my fabric choices but don't really want to buy any more fabric!  I'll have to see what I can come up with...