Rosellas in our yard quilt

I'm working on a new wall hanging featuring a pair of rosellas, birds which frequent our back yard to scrounge the pickings from our canary aviary.

About three years ago, my sister gave me a beautiful calendar full of drawings of Australian birds. She thought I might like to use the images for inspiration. She was right!

Quite a while back I started on the background, using crazy patch technique to fill the space. I found lots of green fabrics, and some blueish ones to let the sky peek through the trees.

The birds are a collage of fabrics, cut in the shapes of feathers, or the neck, beak, head. I drew the outline, then transferred the shape to a piece of lawn, lined it with batting, and began to attach patches with dabs of fabric glue. Painting with fabric I call it.

After a few not so satisfying attempts at 'painting', I realised that the rosella's shoulder should be black with yellow outlines, not yellow with black. Once I changed that, I began to be happier with my quilt.

At last I have finished free machine embroidering the two birds, and have positioned them on the background.

Focal point

I wanted them to be hard to see, just as in nature. Even though they are very brightly plumaged, they are not easy to spot in the trees.

This is a bit of a problem in an art quilt though, because how will my subject matter (the birds) show up against the background of the quilt?

I arranged the two birds to the left first, and was surprised to see that they are visible enough to draw the viewer in.

However, I noticed that I had stitched some browns in the crazy background at the bottom right to represent the tree they are sitting in, so I placed the birds on twigs in that area.

I'm happy now with the layout, so the next stage is to attach the birds to their twigs and free machine embroider the edge to the quilt background.

I'll show you when I get that done.