Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Bird Quilt Part 1

Some of the earliest posts on this blog were about a fish quilt that my mom and I made for family friends. Well, when we heard that the brother of the recipient of the first quilt was also having a baby, we knew we needed to get to work again.

As we looked around for inspiration, we found this quilt that we really liked by Carol. It wasn't until after I designed a quilt around it that I realized that hers was only 15"x20".

I got to work with my pencil and my graph paper.

And once I had an idea I was fairly happy with, it was time to draw it larger. I drew out all the branches on a single piece of paper that was the size I wanted for our quilt. Then I drew each bird on their own pages so I could cut them out and play around with placement, size, etc.

I also headed to the fabric store while they were having a sale and looked for inspiration. I found this colourful Eric Carle fabric that was fantastic, so I snapped that up. And I was able to find a green in my stash that went really well.

The next thing was to pull out our stashes and pick fabric for the various bird while balancing colour and colour placement.

Can you see our vision yet? :D

We decide to do the branches using raw edge applique and stitching it down by machine, which my mom took the lead on.

The leaves and birds we decided to hand applique, which my mom also took the lead on. (This is what happens when two people in two different cities work on a quilt during a pandemic.)

Confirming placement from a distance

The bits of the birds (legs, tails, head pieces), we decided to do by machine as well. (We wanted to make sure the baby quilt was durable for using and washing.) 

Here is a gap for the legs to be added.

Because of this, my mom left parts of the birds open so that I could come in later and do the machine parts.

See the pair of orphaned legs in the middle there?
It was easier to not hand stitch anything yet for that bird.

You might have noticed these birds don't have any eyes yet. We struggled with what to do for the eyes - especially given that we were trying to make a durable baby quilt that also wasn't an insane amount of work. In the end, we decided to use a fabric marker to draw the black parts of the eyes onto white paper. It was set with the iron and then hand appliqued on to the birds. I did this on boxing day while my parents abandoned my brother and I to have Christmas with others :P (Covid restrictions limited who could be there and we had gotten to do Christmas with my parents the day before.) Apparently I didn't document this part of the process.

Over Christmas break we took the quilt up to my grandparents house with us to put in the frames so we could baste it and then quilt it in the hoop later. But as is the case with taking project to gramma's, there's lots of encouragement to keep quilting :). 

We got to do some three-generational quilting on the top and managed to get it quilted and rolled for all the markings we had done.

It's always great to quilt with others (that's often the point of quilting :)), and it was especially nice to have some family time around the quilt after having 2 years of limited interactions. (This was the first time my parents and my brother and I were seeing my grandparents at the same time since Christmas 2019.)