Blue Birds of Happiness

I am so loving these pieced birds for a new quilt I’ve started. And since this month’s color for our scraps is blue, these are blue birds. Of happiness, naturally. They do make me so happy! But first ....

My dear fur daughter/sewing supervisor Darla got an email from Molly (Sally’s supervisor) suggesting a minor modification to the bird wing to make it, um, more “tasty”.  Well, I knew I’d get no peace from Darla until I tried it. And I LOVED it! Thanks, Molly!

Left:  Before                                                  Right:  After

With the new wing more visually pleasing TASTY, I decided to make one bird in the reverse direction. We will have another blue month later in the year, and I will another two blue birds then, but I have to show off the “mate” of the new bird (left, below) that I finished this weekend. 

Again, these are 10.5” blocks.  I have had a couple questions about how I did the beak. You will notice that there aren’t any seams around them. For such a tiny piece, I figured why bother? So, I took a 1.5” brown square and folded it diagonally, twice. The raw edge is sewn into the seam to align with the head. Think of a prairie point. When the block is done, I just topstitch the beak with brown thread and a very short (1.5) stitch length. Blurry closeup below (sorry, it’s the best my old camera can do....)

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Over the weekend I also stitched up four 10.5” scrappy string blocks for Covered in Love over at Kat and Cat’s blog.

They will be winging their way (sorry, couldn’t resist) to Kat this week.  And I’ve continued to work on my brother’s Hot Rod quilt. The top is slightly past the halfway point, thank goodness. I hope to have that top wrapped up by the weekend. But first, I’m going to quilt my Autumn Sampler quilt so I will have enough safety pins, because I’m too lazy to go out and buy more today. More pictures on the weekend.

Have a great week!