Birds
One of the fun news articles this past week—-and don’t we all appreciate something nice….has been about a woman who bought an unfinished embroidery project at an estate sale and enlisted others to complete it. I have a similar project but haven’t enlisted anyone to to work on it besides myself.
It is a set of beautifully embroidered state birds. Someone decided to paint the outlines of the states in an off color white–at first I thought they had mended the blocks but after looking at a few more, I discovered some state outlines. Ohio is not that remarkable a shape–but Texas is.
First I had to trim up the edges to make them all reasonably uniform sized.
Then I had to calculate the pieces to make these into square-ish blocks AND figure out 
how to cut those pieces using the rulers I had.
Adding all those corners took some time but now all the blocks have been cornered and are awaiting joining to their neighbors. I am not putting them any particular order although I thought about putting all the cardinals together somewhere.
Final challenge will be the quilting; how to not overwhelm that beautiful embroidery will be something I will have to think about a bit. That will occupy my mind while I am doing the rather mundane part of trimming (again) and stitching together.
Sylvia Weir Art 
I love the embroideries. My son is “mad about birds”,he goes spotting whenever time permits Luckily, so is my daughter-in-law as well. In February they will go to Kenya in Africa, visiting with her cousin but surely they will be spotting and photographing the birds as well.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family
Ulla
Beautiful. Love the idea of state birds. But the time to embroider them!!!
I bought the blocks from a teacher at our guild. She had bought them at an estate sale somewhere—-but there were only 47. So three states are not represented. You might think it would be Hawaii and Alaska—but there is a block for Hawaii, none for Alaska—and the other two I think might be Georgia and Florida. I would guess those blocks were in the process of being embroidered and not with the other blocks. Somewhere there are those three blocks partially embroidered.
the embroidery is perfectly done—I couldn’t begin to match it—but I can stitch them together. It is about half done now….still no ideas about how to quilt it.
There are just 47 blocks and there should be 50. I debated about a way to include the missing three states but decided not to do so—but it isn’t all together yet so I may change my mind.
I am envious of the trip to Kenya to see the birds. The birds I remember best are the ostriches and than a huge flock on flamingoes on Lake Navasha—–but that was a long time ago.