Morning Chorus ATCs

 

I love these little cards. The Blackbirds in each one have such character and personality, I am absolutely thrilled with out they came out! The theme of Morning Chorus, for me, is waking up early in the morning to hear all of the birds chattering away to each other in the garden. Growing up in the countryside with quite a lot of trees and gardens around us, there were lots of garden birds to watch and listen to, and my Dad is quite keen on spotting birds and can recognise their calls so that has sort of been passed on to me. Having now moved out to my own place, I am trying really hard to encourage birds to my tiny outdoor space (a fire escape balcony outside our kitchen window) with several bird feeders, and plants all along the top of the railings. I have also planted a little creeping Jasmine plant in the hopes that if I can provide more cover and shelter with foliage, I might attract even more insects and birds and just wildlife in general to the otherwise barren space. 

At the parent's house there are several pairs of Blackbirds who will come right up (or even inside during the summer!) to the back door to ask for grapes, and then beat them on the patio outside to break the grape apart. They are hilarious to watch, and seem to have some kind of pact with the cat who doesn't bother chasing them. It's probably not worth it with the hassle that the Mrs Blackbirds' give him, peeping and shouting at him whenever he dares turn a whisker in their direction. 

I was beyond thrilled when one of the first birds to my feeders was a Blackbird! He also joins in the morning chorus here, sitting in a tree at the other end of the carpark at the back of our house. You can hear him and many others all singing away. 

I actually spent a little bit of time researching photographs of Blackbirds online to see what sort of composition I wanted. I tested a couple of ideas out on paper first and settled on this one as I liked how big I could get the bird so that he would really stand out. 

The fabrics have been chosen for their muted shades of green, grey, blue and purple, with that one splash of orangey/peach to show the sun rising. That particular fabric also has marbled lines in a gold metallic ink over it so it's really like tendrils of sunlight starting to creep through the sky. 

The top fabric is a sort of blocky batik fabric so it has different shades in it also and for this I've just added a couple of lines of running stitch at the bottom in a single strand to add some interest. The sunlight fabric I've edged in blanket stitch using two strands so it is slightly chunkier and more of a definite line. Fly stitches have been added over the top of these two fabrics to represent flying birds silhouetted against the sky. 

In the fabric below I've gone around any shape in the pattern with a single strand of back stitch and, in areas where there were big sections of a block shape I've kind of filled that in more with some rows of running stitch, as well as doing the same where needed at the top of the layer to help hold everything down. Bullion knots have been added along the edge of the fabric to hide the rough edge. 

The very bottom layer has had all green sections filled with two strand seed stitches, and any purple sections randomly filled with french knots. The same french knots run across the top of the fabric layer in either green or purple and this is really random across the set. One card has no purple at all, one card has nearly no green and two of them are better mixes. It was just complete pot luck on the colours. 

The tree stump my little friends are perched on has been cut from felt, with a little extra detail on the stump itself in a lighter grey felt. A larger branch has also been cut and I've stitched a jaunty twig with leaves in a filled detached chain stitch. (The chain stitch worked first and then two straight stitches added through the centre to block the colour.) I've used back stitches around the edges of these shapes, filled in with straight stitches at different lengths, and some french knots for texture. I didn't go too wild with this because really it's meant to be a silhouette of the tree so you wouldn't see too many details or colour variations anyway. 

My Blackbirds themselves are pleasingly simple. I cut a template out for the body and cut out my four shapes one at a time when I was ready for them to reduce the risk of them fraying (I could also have backed the fabric with bondaweb but I don't often do that unless I really need to). They have been blanket stitched down onto the fabric; legs have been added with embroidery, all straight stitches just filling in an initial embroidered outline and then adding little toes, with the wing detail also stitched on in grey using a whipped back stitch. 

I had also made a template for the beak, which has been cut out from felt and stitched down straight through the middle only. I eyeball cut (get it?) the orange ring for the eyes, stitched a circle around the inside of the shape to leave a bit extra, and filled in the circle with satin stitch. White thread has been added over the top with a couple of tiny stitches worked at an angle from the satin stitch so that they sit proud on top (if you tried to stitch the white in the same direction as the black thread you risk it being absorbed underneath the black stitches). 

It's amazing how, even though I used templates and actually sketched an outline to follow beforehand, these birds all look slightly different! I think a lot of it is in the eyes and the positioning of the little white speck which makes them look so alive and lifelike. But also some of their postures are different from each other so are more crouched or upright, and the backgrounds have also given a different look depending on how thick each layer has been cut. It's been so much fun to make these!

So, to end, the stitches used are; fly stitch, running stitch, blanket stitch, satin stitch, back stitch, straight stitch, whipped back stitch, french knots, bullion knots, detached chain stitch and seed stitch.