...the bird is on the wing. Or busy nesting by now, I should think! If you're doing a little nesting yourself, or making a quilt for newlyweds, I may have just the thing: a new quilt in issue 48 of Today's Quilter called Nesting Birds.
Designed as a traditional frame quilt, the central motif is composed of pieced hearts surrounding an embroidered monogram and this is surrounded in turn by garlands of leaves and pairs of birds, with more hearts blossoming at each corner.
If embroidery isn’t your thing you could pick out a favourite print as the focus for your quilt. But if you can do a simple backstitch - I have a quick tutorial here - then you'll have no trouble adding a special date to make it truly yours. I embroidered my own wedding anniversary, so it looks like I'm keeping this one ;-)
The eyes of my billing and cooing birds are made from vintage buttons, but you could add more embroidery.
And the gently curving branches are machine appliqued bias tape, glue-basted into position.
Lining up the edge of the bias tape with the inside edge of your presser foot will keep your stitches lovely and even.
I made my quilt with a favourite Tilda collection, Circus, rounded out with a few prints from their new Basics range, a selection of green Tilda prints for the leaves and a delicate Soft Teal background fabric. My quilter, Jane Brereton, added softly trailing hearts.
When I first designed this quilt the birds and branches were positioned in the opposite direction, facing outwards, but I realised that when the quilt was on a bed they'd look like they were falling off. And that wouldn't do at all...
Nicola xx