Chirping Away

It's that time! I have made all the birds for my Mom's bird quilt and now I am beginning to put them all together.

This is kinda sorta the layout I have decided to sew together. I did not use all the birds I have made, and I needed one extra. (I'll show you that in a bit.)

Since I do not make my birds exactly the same size, I can't (nor do I want) to line them all up in neat rows and columns. I think that's really boring. I like it when some of them face each other like they are talking. I like having them on different levels. I like tall birds facing shorter birds. I really try to make them so the legs are not one long column, so I shift them around.

Because all the backgrounds are WOW, it's really hard to see, but since the blocks are squares or rectangles, there is a limit as to how I can sew them together. I don't want to cut off any wing or beak tips. The legs are another matter. I make my birds with longish legs because I know I can always trim them down, because adding to make them longer is out of the question. 

Yes, set-in squares are often required. You can see how to do them here, and here.

Once I know how I want them arranged, I take a picture, and then try to draw the outline of the shape of each block, then I try to work out how to sew sections together using only straight seams. I generally have to add fabric to each block to make it fit into a row or column. In the photo above you can see six birds, sewn into two panels that are ready to be sewn to each other (right down the middle). You can see all the places where I added strips of fabric.

It's a laborious process, made all the more complicated because each block or panel has to be exactly "square," which means the sides are absolutely straight and the corners are exactly 90 degrees. I've said it before, and I'll say it over and over again as many times as it takes. If you sew something perfectly straight to something else perfectly straight, your finished flimsy will like flat as a pancake with no ripples and your longarm quilter will absolutely love you.

I also use pins. I use a lot of them. Go ahead and laugh, but it helps me get the precision I want.

The "bad" thing, at least in my case, is that the quilt will look so perfect everybody will think it was paper pieced, which it is most assuredly NOT. Every class I teach, every lecture I give, somebody interrupts me and asks, "Is that paper-pieced," and "how did you get everything so perfect?"

The short answer is, my friends, I pay attention and make absolutely sure everything is straight before I go from one step to another. If I sew a strip to one side of a bird, after I press it, I put a ruler up against it. If the edge isn't 100% perfectly straight, I trim it so it is. I do a lot of trimming. Nobody is perfect.

This yellow bird is the last bird.

Because of the way I put the bird blocks together, the position of each bird might shift a little bit. That really can't be helped, and I do often change my mind as I work my way through it.