Taking advantage of the grotty weather.

The edges of our lawns look like this, so trying to get out to do any work in the garden is a waste of time.

The borders are waterlogged and so I have been enjoying some guilt free creativity until things improve.

I think these two pages are complete.   For the thrush page I have used a piece of dyed silk carrier rod down the left hand side with a strip of photocopied medieval text and two very narrow strips cut from a wallpaper border and coloured to match, framing it.  The squares are cut from cotton fabrics backed with iron on Vilene and their edges dipped into melted embossing powder.  They were then stitched in place and a running stitch worked round the edge.    The blackbird has a background of pieces torn from music patterned wrapping paper with part of a dictionary page in between them. These were machined onto the calico background using an automatic stitch.  I used little squares of cotton fabric again here applied by hand and circled the word Blackbird with a black pen.   I wrote the name of each bird onto small pieces of pelmet vilene and stitched them to the background.   (I don't know how I managed to move this photo to one side and can't get it back again!)

I think these two wagtail pages are finished but need to look at them a bit longer to be sure.

Slightly different elements were applied in a similar way to the previous pages.

The woodpeckers are 'work in progress' but are not far off completion.

My sparrowhawk is waiting for his nextdoor neighbour.   I must look for some different embellishments for the rest of the pages as I am in danger of them becoming samey.  I am finding the whole process very therapeutic and as long as I choose the components for each page before the daylight goes, I can then have a relaxing evening putting each page together.

I start off with a nicely ironed piece of fabric but as you can see, by the time I have stitched everything in place it looks pretty dreadful!    I could do with one of those tiny quilter's irons.

I hope you are all safe and have suffered no damage from the gales we are experiencing.  We lost part of our fence in last winter's gales but so far this winter have only had the green wheelie bin blown over.  The snowdrops are taking their time to come into flower - very wise - I think they know a thing or two.