The Third Bird

 

This is the third bird. I think of holiday colors as red, green and gold. So this red and gold bird really fits.  See that wing? Hold that thought.

I had thought this fabric would make a terrific box, until I realized the scale was all wrong. The box in this picture is 8-1/2" wide. There is no way that print would work on a box that size. It's just too big and the print would be cut up and nobody would know if the box was gold or white or red. And it would grab too much attention.  HOWEVER...

Students are often aghast when I tell them to cut a hole in the middle of a perfectly good piece of fabric to get a fussy cut of whatever they want. YES! I expect you to do that. Do you want a terrific bird (or whatever) or do you want an ordinary, plain one? I know which one I prefer.

Rearranging things a bit got me to this placement of the birds, and I liked it. I don't want the birds in the corners, because there is too much white space around them and the quilt would look like it had a corner chopped off. I like the way they stand in for boxes. Actually, what I like about this pattern is the rhythm of the repetition, one shape after another, but with variation in color and pattern to break it up a bit. Then the birds add a bit of sass. Of course, I needed more boxes, and you can see how I audition fabrics.

This is the kind of fabric you have to be careful with. At first glance it is red with gold, but really it is the other way around. Set on the design wall, it doesn't look as red as some of the other red boxes.

This reads as "pink" to me, and not really Christmas-y. But I was running out of options, and there is already a box in the quilt with a pinkish ribbon, and the Amaryllis print has a lot of pink in it, so I knew I could get away with it. (Translation: it would not look totally out of place.)

 

I found this red fabric in one of the big bins I had set aside for "other projects." DAMN!

This box was made from scraps. I only had a long too-narrow piece of this green. You can hardly tell where I sewed it up.

This fabric was in a box that was given to me over 10 years ago. I did have to piece this together, and you don't have to look too hard to see where, but I tried not to make it so obvious that it stuck out like a sore thumb. There's pink in this fabric too.

So now that I have enough blocks I have to finish working out an arrangement I like. I am not sure I am going to use the border of the original pattern (in fact, I'm sure I definitely WON'T be doing it like the pattern, but that should surprise no one).