A Humming Collage

 My first thought when I saw that the new theme was collage was to do something simple, whatever that would be. I had a difficult time coming up with a subject along those lines. I started to peruse my books to see if I had any inspiration, and that's when I stumbled upon this book, given to me by my daughter awhile ago. 

I had completely forgotten that I even had this book. When she gave it to me, I thought I'd likely never try anything like that, but still hung on to the book. Even when I started paging through, I thought "don't think I could do this". On the other hand, it was very intriguing, and it seemed to fit the collage theme! 

Then Christian Dalbec, a photographer from northern Minnesota that I follow on Instagram, posted a photo of a hummingbird on his Instagram feed, a cropped image of the hummingbird's head, which you can see here. I reached out to Christian to ask if I could use his photo as inspiration for this challenge, and he agreed. Now I was committed. 

After reading through the book, watching some Susan Carlson videos and studying Christian's photograph, I dove in, sketching out the hummingbird head on fabric, then starting the process of building the collage. To say it made a huge mess is an understatement (bits of fabric everywhere), but what grand fun! 

This is the image in its early stages. There was much pinning and eventually gluing. Even after the pieces were tacked on with glue, some were changed. I could only work for so long before I had to step away and work on other projects, just to give my brain a break. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this challenge. 

Eventually, it was finished. Once all the pieces were glued down, I did some thread painting using threads that matched the fabrics. My free motion quilting skills are still not great, and I didn't want my rudimentary skills with thread painting to be too obvious. It was fun to look at the back and see how my quilting got more relaxed and improved as I went along. 

This photo doesn't show it well, but I thought you'd enjoy seeing the back. I used 12 different thread colors, all Aurifil 50 wt., all from my thread stash. It was grand fun until it came time to bury the threads! 

And finally, the finish! 

This was, by far, my most challenging project since I've been part of this group. It was so much fun, but so much work! Will I make another one? I'm not sure, but I have been thinking about subjects, so maybe. This finished piece measures 18.5 inches by 26.5 inches, a very small project compared to the size of the projects worked on by Susan Carlson, the author of Serendipity Quilts. I'm terribly tempted to do something on a larger scale, but then I think of the time and the mess - but oh, the fun! 

I'll write up more details about the creating of this piece on my personal blog, if you are interested. Thanks for the fun, yet challenging, challenge! 

Wendy