Fat and Cheeky Baby Bird Quilt

The baby quilt is finally complete.

When I began this project all I knew was that I wanted birds - everything else evolved along the way. It was going to have fat baby birds but they each had to have a personality - so each was appliqued with hand embroidered details added. Some are cotton, some have a touch of wool and there is a silk breast here and there; all tweet with "attitude" !!! I knew it was going to be mostly white with touches of blue and a tiny bit of red - the Mom-to-be loves vintage things so it had to have that old fashioned puckery look. I didn't wash the fabric ahead of time but waited until it was complete before washing and drying it to get the lovely puffy effect for the birds.

(I'm so glad that I did a test piece using the hand dyed red fabric for the red bird - it ran and made the white pink so I chose another red which ran very slightly. Luckily, I belong to a Yahoo dye group and one of the very clever ladies suggested using a Shout color grabber sheet and that worked like a charm)

To make it a little more special, I wanted it to have something for the Mom to read to the baby while they snuggle - so I added verse taken from poems about birds and stitched the text along the borders using my trusty Pfaff 1475 - just fabulous for this - I can program in any text I want and it will stitch out from memory - no hooping needed! One border includes a verse from a popular old Scottish poem learned when I was young "Wee Chooky Birdie, To Lo Lo . . . "

As far as the quilting goes, I wanted a stippled look but decided as I went along that the plain white squares called out for something different to break up the monotony - pinwheels added just the right touch giving it a little more tailored effect and keeping it from being too feminine (I thought).

It's such a dark and dreary day here making it really hard to take a good picture but I'm sure you'll get the idea -- it is sooo soft with just the right amount of puckers surrounding the puffy birds.

Back to felting after the beginning of the year!