Le petit oiseau de toutes les couleurs

Welcome! Challenge 11.6 of Project Quilting is due in less than an hour and I am frantically writing up my post. The challenge was "Vibrant & Vivacious". It took me 5 days to think about it and 1 full day to make the quilt. It's one of my favourites to date. I hope you like it.

Le petit oiseau de toutes les couleurs

If you're wondering what's up with the French title, it's because this small bird of all colours is based on a song by Gilbert Bécaud (1927 - 2001), a song writer extraordinaire from France. His song, "Le petit oiseau de toutes les couleurs" is one of my favourites. 😊

The song starts with the singer coming out of his home in the morning and the bird is jumping around on the sidewalk waiting for him. It's nice out and the singer decides to follow him. At one point he loses the bird but then hears the bird whistling - he's waiting for him. Finally the singer watches the bird fly off over the sea. He says "I can't fly and I can't swim, I'm a prisoner here. Don't hold it against me. Bon voyage and come back soon"

Drawing the bird and

starting to fill in the colours

The idea

I had no idea what to make but remembered that I had seen a lot of art quilts with birds in them lately so that brought to mind "Le petit oiseau de toutes les couleurs", and that was that!

I went through my quilting art magazines and saw an image that would do. Since I just drew it from the magazine, mine is quite different - as my son said, more of a pigeon shape but hey, everyone recognized it as a bird, which is what matters!

I ended up drawing the image on a sheet of Ricky Tim's Stable Stuff. It was perfect since the fabric scraps didn't move when placed on it. I glued the pieces down, and when I was done, I simply cut around the bird and then started making the background.

The bird of all colours

Background

I have a large cookie tin of strips and scraps of solid fabric, mostly Kona. I listened to the song again and decided to have the bird on the sidewalk with the sea in the background. I found almost all of the strips that I needed in the tin, and only went into my stash for the blue fabric for the sky.

FMQ background, mostly with Kimono silk thread.

After piecing the strips, I started free motion quilting (FMQ). I used a heavier thread for the sidewalk and then everything else is quilted with Kimono silk thread. I wanted a shadow of the landscape so as not to distract from the bird.

You can see the FMQ better if you click on the image to make it bigger. The first green layer is grass and vegetation, the next layer of browns is the beach, then it's three blue fabric for the sea and the final two blues are the sky. I even used trapunto for the two clouds.

What I learned

I had so much fun cutting up little bits of scrap fabric for the bird. I know that I'm going to be doing more of these and I want to figure out how to make it less messy. I can't stand all those little bits of fabric everywhere - paper is so much easier to cut up, but not as exciting!
I finished the quilt by facing it. I couldn't find my favourite tutorial so I ended up just looking at another faced art quilt that I had made and figuring it out. It was a lot more work - I need to find that tutorial...of course it's somewhere in my favourites.
Project Quilting is coming to an end for another year 😞 This is my second year participating. Last year I only "discovered" it on the last challenge and had so much fun that I put the event down on my quilting calendar for 2020. I participated in 5 of the 6 challenges. I've really enjoyed myself and look forward to next year.
I want to thank Kim Lapacek of Persimon Dreans for the wonderful work that she's done this year. I'm wearing my new Project Quilting t-shirt - it's awesome!