Animal Quilt - Quetzal Bird

All the 10x10" animal squares for the quilt are done. I just have to figure out how much/little to quilt them. I've been working on the center panel quilting/painting the tree and leaves but that's for another post.

The borders of the quilt are 10" wide and I was going to paint them and include some plants, flowers, animals and maybe an insect or two. I wanted to include the Quetzal bird because he's really colorful and I doubt many people have even heard of it. So I went ahead and painted it.

The painting looks okay but this little guy looks more iridescent and the paint just didn't capture his brilliant plumage. So, I decided to try to thread paint it using embroidery thread. I tried to match the colors to what I had in the way of thread and started with a zig zag line in the different areas to stabilize it a bit. I don't have any stabilizer ironed to the back of this and I probably should have.

I started with the yellow and added that to the feathers and head/beak areas. Then I went for a darker green. Remember to build your colors and add highlights or lighter colors at the end. I added dark red on the breast area and filled in with a brighter red. I added the black area next and some bright blue highlights. For the branch I used two colors of brown (one dark and one light) in the top thread. It got pretty dense but I like how the effect.

The tail is really long and I used a dark green and a dark blue and then added lighter colors on top but I wanted it darker then the main bird. You can see how my fabric/batting have pulled and bunched up which is because I didn't have any stabilizer to help keep the fabric in place. My bird isn't really done yet. I'm going to trim the backing away as close as possible but leave 1/4" of fabric around my bird and turn him into an applique. I'll hand sew it onto my border and then I'll sew I'll finish the bird blending his feathers out.

I also just realized I forgot to sewn his feet on the branch. I'll fix that later. But so far so good. I'm pretty happy with how this applique turned out. Maybe I'll video the next one so you can see how I did it.

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