Birdies and housies

Started off today by working on a couple of challenge pieces - a piece to theme "birds" for the Mixed Media Monday Challenge - this is a 6x6 piece, hand-dyed fabric stamped with a bird stamp in purple and blue, then quilted with feathers, then birds stamped on paper added and little feather "nests" - I'm calling it "Birds of a Feather". After that, I tackled the Inching Artists Challenge, which is "houses" this week - I decided to make a little town full of houses in bright colours - rather cute, if I do say so myself. I have decided to pass on the Fluffy Fatbottom Challenge this week - the theme is "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman" and I'm afraid it just doesn't really inspire me. But I'm not stressing over it - after all, the point of challenge blogs is to give us little pushes and help to explore or let your mind work in a way it might not normally - getting stressed isn't part of the point.

So instead, I pulled out some linen fabric I bought at FoQ which I haven't been sure what I wanted to do with - I was browsing a friend's copy of Batik & Beyond and found a quilt with blocks which had a similar centre to these, and suddenly, I knew what to do with the linen bits (they were only small bits - maybe 20cm square in about 12 colours?). The outer rings of the blocks are from an old linen dress which I have been dutifully recycling. I used a lot of starch while making these blocks - the coloured linen is fine, quite stiff, but the taupe dress was very soft and flowy (good in a dress, less good in quilt blocks). There are 16 blocks (6.25 inches each), and I was going to put them together in a 4x4 grid, but actually, I'm thinking I might make myself a bag instead. We'll see.

Also got a couple of postcards - K for Kiwi (again, but different, from Judy) and another birthday card - this one came from Myra, who also sent along a little packet of beads - thanks Myra!