Sharon’s Blog

Here’s what I’ve been working on lately:  I finished these two birds to be juried for a group show.

They are both large-scale pieces (for me, anyways!). The white bird is about 15″ tall, and the blue one is about 22″. The necks are beaded, but the feathers in the body are made of fabric. On the blue bird, I hand-painted the fabric before making the feathers. I’m happy to say that even though I had problems with the first set of legs I made for the blue bird, it is now standing firmly on its own. It was a pain to figure out how to make that happen, but I’m glad I stuck with it!

Well, it’s a new year and time to get back to work! I made new bird legs and cut a new bird body. The old body had been sewn and unsewn so many times, it was looking a bit like a Franken-bird! Plus, this gave me the opportunity to refine the pattern for the body, which had some curves I was not entirely happy with.

Now I’m stuffing it super-firmly. It’s almost time to get the bird’s (new) legs in… There will be much holding of breath around here until that’s done. This part of construction involves lots of hand-sewing. I have a handy needle and pin cushion that looks like a tomato with a baby strawberry hanging off of it. It’s the same pin cushion I’ve had since my mom first taught me to sew, and it’s just like the one she had! It works great, but I do wonder, what’s up with the whole tomato/strawberry thing?

Here is the next bird I’m working on. It’s based on a little blue heron, and is the largest bird I’ve attempted so far — it’s about life-sized. The head has been fully beaded, and it’s heavy! I was really pleased with the way the legs came out, but in putting them into the body I’ve managed to completely break them. Aaargh!

Now it’s time to make a new body and some new legs and try again. The really tricky bit will be to weight the body in such a way that the bird will be free-standing and that means counter-balancing the weight of the head.