Animal friends

Pets give us a lot of joy one way and another. Dogs and cats are good company and faithful companions (well, maybe not cats, they are opportunists) but, you know what I mean. It’s good to stroke a cat or pat a dog.

My sister can’t have a pet where she lives but she gets a lot of joy out of visiting birds. She has two bird feeders and a great many visitors of various breeds. She does feed them fat balls which they greatly appreciate. Her garden shed is full of bird seed and bird treats (of the healthy variety). We live in the countryside, so we don’t feed the birds (because they are fine) except by planting trees they like, but we do provide water especially when it’s dry. We also have a couple of nesting boxes for possums. We get wallabies and koalas and lots of birds: kookaburras, noisy miners, channel bill cuckoo, rosellas, lorikeets, king parrots, magpies, magpie lark, rails and so on. During nesting season we have serious turf wars going on.

Wallabies in the back garden

Yellow tailed black cockatoos

We don’t see a lot of injured wildlife, but I’d like to give a shout out to everyone who supports the work of Wildlife Rescue which saves many sick and injured animals each year. So my ‘pet’ block is dedicated to all those who give a helping hand to animals in the wild by supplying healthy food, reliable water in a drought, and habitat or who support wildlife in any way.

My inspiration is my bird feeder - did I mention we don’t feed the birds? - yeah, I actually use it to burn mosquito coils, but that’s another story. I’ve put a fantail in the birdfeeder, because they are birds with style. Although they are not brightly coloured, they do have very stylish tails. The little brown birds remind me of the wrens and finches and sparrows that visit my sister’s birdfeeder.

Below are another couple of photos from the garden. The kookaburras are very territorial and make sure we have a dawn chorus. I’m not sure if the carpet python was after water or birds. We don’t mind the pythons, but we do have other less friendly snakes. Luckily we hardly ever see them.

kookaburra in the rain

bird bath and/or fast food for pythons

My pattern uses a few different techniques. It’s basically pieced in rows out of rectangles but there are a couple of tweaks: I appliqued the little round corners of the bird feeder because I didn’t want to piece those little curves, and I foundation paper pieced the tail section just to get it nice and accurate. The triangles can be done either by ‘snowballing’ (stitch along the diagonal and flip) or by using templates.

I had the most fun with the tail. It really lends itself to fabric that changes colour or that has a stripe or something that looks like a feather. I first made the pattern in a more realistic shade of brown with a feathery tail, and then I made it in a fabric that changed colour smoothly - this added depth which is pleasing.

Just a few little tips about the piecing: To add the curved piece, I staystitched the curve and then clipped it. This made it pretty easy to sew to the curve as the clipping was already done.

To get those little round quarter circles, i turned the edge over on templates, then appliqued them to the rectangle. This was the easier than trying to piece it.

To do a lot of the triangular shapes, I cut rectangles and squares and then ‘snowballed’ them. I think some people call this ‘stich and flip’. You fold the square along the diagonal, stitch it to the corner of the rectangle and flip it so it creates a triangle. It’s much easier than cutting triangles because you can align the square with the corner of your rectangle before you sew.

Do check out the other blogs and patterns. They are so cute.

12 inch blocks, bird blocksSusan Griffithspets, 12 inch block, 12 inch blo, quilt block mania, quilt block mania bloghop, bloghopComment