THE ITTY BITTY BIRDIE QUILT 🐦

This is my itty, bitty, birdie quilt❣️ It was a block of the month wool appliqué quilt. This was my first time doing wool appliqué and I had a ball! Working with hand dyed wool and hand dyed thread is an absolute joy!

Although this is a tiny quilt measuring in at only 24" X 24", this is the most expensive quilt that I've made to date.  Hand dyed wool and hand dyed thread are costly.  

To start with I purchased all of the hand dyed threads that I would need. Then, each month I would get a tiny envelope with tiny bits of wool in it and directions for a new little birdie.  It was always a surprise as we were only shown a black and white outline sketch of the quilt without the borders when we signed up for the Block of the Month.  That meant we had no idea of what the actual quilt would look like when it was done. 

Once I got that month's package I would get to work cutting out the wool and whip stitching it to the background piece.  Then came the fun part ... embellishing it with all sorts of stitches.  The embellishing is what takes the birds from flat to three dimensional.

You can see in these photos that there is quite a difference before and after the birds are embellished. 

The lavender bird below is one of my favorites.  It's just so silly!

There were nine little birds altogether.  One month a rather plain little bird pattern arrived and so I stitched it differently and made it my own.  I also decided to put him in the middle of my quilt and not use the arrangement that we were given.  This little bird took his time showing up in my mailbox.  I thought he was lost for sure.  It turned out that the post office had held it because there was a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina.  I'm in Charlotte, which is inland, and we only got a quick shower of raindrops and nothing more but the post office held it anyway.  We did, however, get an earthquake while I was doing this birdie.  It was a 5.1 at its center and the strongest quake here in North Carolina in 104 years.  In our eleven years here it was our second one.   

At one point, while waiting for the next month's little bird to arrive,  I tried making my own pattern and stitching a hedgehog.  I would like to design my own quilt someday.  I'd love to make a tree of life in the middle and use the hedgehogs in the borders with hearts in between them.  

For month #10 and 11 the borders arrived in the mail.  They sent two different green wools as the background for the borders, but it was a shade of green I didn't care for at all against the blue backgrounds of the birds.  I made the borders anyway, but was kind of on the fence whether or not to send away for another color of wool and just design my own borders, because I really didn't care for what was sent. I finally decided to keep it as it was since the wool is so expensive and I had worked really hard on the borders.

Then I put the tiny quilt on my longarm.  Once I stitched around the birds they really popped up fat and fluffy! I stitched little sticks with leaves on them and some flowers then pebbled around them.  

 

Remember to pick up a needle and thread and stitch some love into your world❣️