Tuesday 10 March 2009

A blue bird of happiness






















Woot!

This has been a crafty saga of epic proportions.

Not so much in the actual drama, but in the long winded, takes for ever to get to the point, type of epic sagas (James Joyce, I'm looking in your direction).

I'm ashamed to admit this, but this little guy (technically a bower bird) has been kicking around unfinished since (ahem) May 2005.

I'm not proud of it, and I will surrender my craftster's license immediately, if not sooner (wait, no membership - no union or regulatory industry association - we are a bunch of brazen, anarchic mercenaries aren't we?)






















I digress.

Up until 24 hours ago, it was a discarded prototype from a children's mobile I was commissioned to make for Gorman. I sewed over 8 of these not so little buggers and I guess after all that hand sewing, I kinda shoved this one to the back of the cupboard to forget about.

But when I went through my stash of linen for another project, I remembered this guy was kicking around somewhere. The linen side has a beautiful silver foil sheen - too nice to throw away (as I had obviously decided at the time) but there was not enough of it to fashion into something else.

















So when he was resurrected from the scrap box about a week ago - he really was looking quite forlorn. Not only a rejected colour way (brown), he had barely any stuffing, no binding and a had been left half unpicked because he was the wrong shape for the final design.

Well the baby-poo brown pinwale cord had to go (now replaced with a deep midnight blue cord). And at the 11th hour I found a really lovely liberty print in a matching blue. Digging further in the scrap box I found just enough silk bias binding to finish it - and voila!

Elegant and cute at at the same time. Just like me.

3 comments:

Drewzel said...

Love him! And the fabric on that wing is sublimely pretty!

Anonymous said...

i have one of your birds from gorman (bought for my impending babe), she's 2 now & moved onto bionicles, so little bird is back in my room & I love it!

Jimmy Trickle said...

Excellent - glad to hear it went to a good home :)