Blue Burrd of Happiness

Trish Burr creates amazing thread painted birds and then shares them with us so we can stitch them. How lucky are we?

This is Trish's exquisite little bluebird. By the way, I think all of Trish's avians should be called 'Burrds'! I stitched this several years ago and it was a lot of fun.

The bluebird is an adaptation of a painting by Sherry C. Nelson whose books are well worth checking out if you want to try adapting images for your own thread painting projects. Her compositions are eminently thread paintable. The bluebird is on a Trish Burr DVD along with several other  projects.

I made my own pattern and printed it via inkjet onto a piece of Irish Copeland linen. (Copeland is no longer in business.) I found the linen a bit stretchy and the weave is a little more open than I prefer. You can see in some of the photos that I was able to overstretch the fabric causing distortion which I didn't realise until I was finished. I've been told by more than one embroiderer that you can't mount fabric tightly in a wooden hoop. Well, in this case, I was able to mount the fabric too tightly and I hadn't even bound the inner hoop!

The project began with the branch and the feet. I love it when I can achieve 'smudginess' in thread painting. I see a bit of smudging in the centre of the open flower. Yay!

Then it was on to the body. The blue back feathers were stitched first, then the belly. The belly is composed of five shades of colour in a very, very small area. One of the brilliant things about Trish's designs is that she packs a lot of colour into small areas which yields wonderful detail. Sometimes I wonder, though, how on earth I am going to get that many shades into that tiny area?

Speaking of lots of shades, this project has 39 different colours of floss and it's quite a small bird. However, as I said, Trish packs a lot of colours into small areas and I think the results speak for themselves. I've learned from working many Trish projects that less is not more. More is more!

The blue feathers on the back were stitched first because the belly and breast feathers overlap along the edges.

 

Here the bird is nearly finished. (That needle looks painful!)

All done. Oh, what glorious colours!

It was a wonderfully satisfying project and not terribly difficult. I wouldn't make this my first-ever thread painting attempt, but it could be a good candidate as a first thread painted bird project.

References

• Trish Burr Embroidery