jennie kohl austin

At this point I was able to take everything home and work on it on my couch, because assembling the whole thing had to be done by hand. I sat on the couch and sewed and watched episodes of Hoarders. My pictures also aren’t as good at this point because the lighting isn’t nearly as good as it in in my studio.

First I closed up the opening by hand. Then I “couched” some fuzzy black fiber to the rim of the opening to the inside. Couching is basically just stitching a fiber to the outside of a piece of fabric. This turned out good. It was the same fiber that was on the top of the birds head, for symmetry. You can see how the inside of the birdhouse is pretty clean in this picture too.

Next, I hand stitched on the legs. They are so cute! Here she is with no head!

I added the head and feather sections, and added a small hanging loop behind her head.

At this point she was almost done! One last thing I had promised is that she would have three eggs inside her. I went back to the studio and had a really hard time figuring out how to make a fabric egg.

This wasn’t an egg! It was a football!! That wasn’t what I wanted at all. I tried a whole bunch of minor adjustments before I finally came back to my original pattern and figure out I just wasn’t stuffing it full enough. Oops!

And that’s pretty much it! I’ll post some pictures of it “on location” soon!

When I finally got into the studio to really get started on the birdhouse (read: clock was ticking…get started or give up!) I had to spend half a day just cleaning things up enough to be able to sew! I’ll get some new studio pictures up soon, but for now let’s continue with the birdhouse progress.

I started by cutting these long, skinny football-ish shaped pieces out of a fused sandwich consisting of the outside fabric, along with an ultra-firm Pellex stabilizer and a lining fabric.

I then picked which piece I wanted to be the front, and cut out a hole for the entrance to the birdhouse. It turned out ever-so-pleasingly round!

I put all the pieces together inside out, and turned the whole thing and pinned it. Again, pleasingly round!!

Next I had to figure out the head. After a couple of completely failed mockup, I came up with a general shape that I was happy with.

I made up a head, and played with ideas for the face. I think I deleted photos for the early face ideas, which is too bad because they were pretty silly!

Next I played with the ideas for the feathers. I knew I needed some kind of a ruffle for under the head, because the head would not sit directly on the top where all the footballs intersected. I made that piece first, then a tail, then realized those two pieces would have to be all-in-one in order to work! Also, I’d made it with raw edges and they were already a bit more unravelly than I’d like.

So I ran off to the store and purchased some quilting applique stabilizer spray. There was a moment of panic when I sprayed it all down and the color shifted a LOT, but I just prayed it would dry the original colors! Especially since I didn’t have enough of the matching fabrics to redo the ruffle and tail feathers again!

In the meantime, I got out my wire and beading supplies and whipped up some beaded wirey bird legs. I loved how those turned out. After my feathers finally got dry, stacked the feathers and head onto the body (not yet attached here) and you can see the unattached legs too.

Here’s the back, you can see the pinned together seam to the left of the feathers.

In November of 2010 I applied to create a birdhouse for the Pioneer Park Nature Center’s 2011 Artistic Birdhouse Project. This is a fundraising project for our local Nature Center here in Lincoln, where 30 artists were invited to create their artistic interpretation of a birdhouse. Since I am a fiber artist, and the birdhouse did not have to be functional, I created Fiber Art Bird Mama!

Here is my submission sketch and an what I showed as an example of the type of materials I use:

After I got the assignment, I immediately got to work procrastinating the actual production of the birdhouse for a couple months. While I had drawn a lovely sketch to start with, I wasn’t 100% sure how I was actually going to create the structure that would make a fabric bird retain it’s round shape while still being light enough to be hangable. When I could procrastinate no further, I sat down and did a design sketch:

And picked out some fabrics:

Then I proceeded to procrastinate just a little more!