Sam's Blackbird

As a change from all the yarn based craft, I thought you might like to see a little quilt that I made recently as a birthday present for my daughter's partner.

It measures about ten inches square, the same size as the robin quilt I made for my daughter Rose earlier this year.

The robin was paper pieced but I couldn't find a paper piecing pattern for a blackbird that I liked. It didn't help that I wanted it to look something like this ...

Rose took this photo of a blackbird helping himself to some of their wild strawberries this summer so I wanted the blackbird on the quilt to be a strawberry thief too. I decided that I had to applique the blackbird but first came a lot of very bad sketches. Should he have one wing or two? One foot or two? Visible feet obviously, we're not talking disabled blackbirds here. Decisions, decisions.

Having decided on one wing and two feet, I set about sewing the black pieces to a square of hand dyed green fabric. I inherited my Mum's quilting fabric and I can nearly always find just I want amongst it.

Then I had to embroider the legs, beak and eye which took a lot of experimenting. I can't get at my stock of black seed beads at the moment (they're in one of the piles in the room I'm currently decorating) so his eye is actually a glass toy eye, threaded through a tiny piece of felt and mangled on the back of the fabric so it lies flat. The beak is layers upon layers of orange stitches; I kept adding more until it looked about right.

If you look closely you can see that the blackbird is holding a tiny strawberry in his mouth which I cut out of printed fabric. I added a few stitched leaves and then had to embroider a few more straight stitches in black to fill in the shadows in is mouth. 

That was the trickiest part of the project finished. Naturally, Mum had several pieces of strawberry patterned fabric so it was easy to find something for the borders. The quilting thread I chose was hers too; one of the range of variegated threads from YLI. It's sold as machine quilting thread but it works beautifully for hand quilting too which is what I do.

I drew rough leaf shapes meandering around the blackbird for my quilting design. I just use an ordinary pencil for this and make it up as I go along. I also quilted round the blackbird and gave that wing a bit of texture too.

Then I quilted the borders with straight lines and added a binding to finish the quilt.

As you can see, the quilt hangs from a wire hanger. In order to be able to take the hanger off if wanted, I only attached the fabric sleeve at the top of the quilt and then used snap fasteners to close it below the bar of the hanger. This was something I worked out when I made Rose's quilt. You can't really see the bottom of the sleeve in this photo but it's about where the little strawberry button is. The button serves no purpose but I thought it was nice.

I even managed to find a piece of fabric with little blackbirds on for the quilt label and then, as a finishing touch, I printed out Rose's photo on fabric and sewed that to the back too.

Sam was very pleased with his blackbird quilt so that was good. Now I need to turn my mind to the next mini quilt ...