Fantasy Bird

No, not me, the workshop with Sheena Norquay.  :)  I have done very little today to rest my foot which is colouring up nicely, but I have photographed the piece I worked on yesterday.  We spent the morning making a quick sketch of our birds, either directly from Sheena's sheet of suggested bird parts or from our own imaginations.  Sheena gave us some good tips for placing the bird properly in the available space and after drawing the basic shape we transferred it to the fabric.

The rest of the morning was spent printing with various utensils like cotton buds, the rubber ends off pencils, screw ends, credit cards, sticks, anything to make the required marks really.

This is my cheerful little chap.  His beak reminds me of a Muppet character!  I forgot to take a pic before I started the stitching so you are seeing him with his embroidery (after layering with wadding).  

After adding the embroidery we cut back the wadding to the stitching line.  I am not sure yet whether I am going to cut out the space between the feet and under the tail.  The next step is to make the quilt sandwich and stitch round the bird and then quilt the piece.   I may well add a border too.  My brain wouldn't compute the border on Sunday but the light dawned today!

I didn't manage to stay until the end of the workshop because of my foot and fatigue but I feel confident that I can complete this piece and I'm looking forward to getting on with it.  

Sheena was very generous with the information she gave us and while I didn't learn the secrets of her design methods I did learn things that will help me with my future work.  She did talk about her inspirations and her talk on Saturday was very entertaining.  And I enjoyed the day, despite the foot.

On another subject, I've recently come across Kim Klassen's blog and am going to be doing a course with her on the basics of Photoshop.  The course starts on November 8 and is completely FREE!  You can read about it here.  I am reliably informed that Kim is a good teacher and she does have an impressive blog so I think I am going to learn a lot, especially as so far I can only do stuff with somebody holding my hand!  If you want to know about digitally altering your photos for your textile art why don't you join me?  It might help me keep on course :) 

Many thanks for all your good wishes about my foot.  It is growing some very attractive colours and I am being pampered by DH so there are some compensations!

Oops! I almost forgot!  Kate North is running her 'Another Little Quilt Swap' which is great fun.  This time you only need to make something A4 size so if you feel like playing along just click the link at the top of the right sidebar to get the details.  You can sign up now without any worry about dropping out as you are only committed  when you post a photo of your finished quilt.