I finished it! This is both the hardest and the most exciting thing I've ever done. I have wanted to do birds or other nature stuff on a quilt almost since I started quilting. I never had the nerve, or the patterns, or the know-how. I finally decided to give it a try and worked out the patterns based on some paper-pieced patterns in books by Margaret Rolfe, that I altered to make them more real looking and usable as needle turned applique. Some of the patterns I made by looking at drawings on the internet and adapting them.
The crazy quilt background is from the Kwik Krazy Also pattern where you stack 12 pieces of fabric and whack them according to the pattern and then restack them and sew them back together.
When I started doing the crazy quilt stitching, I was just "making it up" as I went. My favorite method of sewing :-) Then I began trying to add realistic looking wildflowers to all the bird blocks. That was fun and I used my Wildflower Field Guide for guidance as well as the internet. I still have some just made up stuff, too.
On the three flower blocks, I also added butterflies, caterpillars, grasshopper, tree frog, bees, ants, snail, etc. And there are three spider webs (for luck!). The biggest one on the lily block has a garden spider in it with his signature zigzag (which I didn't do very well). The raccoon block has dragonflies (the blue one is a Blue Dasher male :-)
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I almost feel bereft now that it is done. I have worked on this for many months and many hours and it seems weird to be finished! The quilting is so-so....I just machine stitched it in the ditch. Looks OK on the front, but the back is sort of puckery in places. I'm not good at the quilting part, but wanted to do the whole thing myself. I will make a fancy label for the back eventually and will post it when it is done
