My first soft sculpture

The idea of creating soft sculpture objects has been floating around in my mind for a very long time. Finally, last week I dove in! "The Artful Bird" by Abigail Patner Glassenberg has been hanging around my house for may weeks now. I am lucky to have a wonderful local library that (seems to) happily order just about any book I request. It ordered "The Artful Bird" on my recommendation and it has been in my possession since. Finally, they told me I couldn't renew it anymore (shucks!) so I decided I had better quit just looking at the darned thing and actually MAKE one of the projects in it. I chose the "beginner" project - The Wren.

The fabric I used was some embroidered vintage linen pieces I tea dyed during one of my private art retreats. I started by copying and cutting out the pattern pieces.

After cutting out the pieces for the main body, I had sewed them together, stuffed my bird with lots of fiber-fill and added some bent wire legs and feet. I was planning to photo each step but I was just too excited about making it and forgot to stop for pics.

After making the main body, the next step was to make the wing and tail pieces. I chose to use the embroidered sections of the vintage linens for the wings and tail. At first, I was cutting out each piece separately - the wing top, the wing back and the felt that I was using instead of batting.

Then I figured out that I just needed to cut out the wing back, stack the pieces and sew them together. After that it was easy to trim the pieces to the proper size. 

Again, I got too excited to take photos of turning the wing pieces and attaching them (*sorry*) but the wings were sewn to the body and embellished with antique shell buttons. For the eyes I used some pretty clear seed beads with gold color inside and finally the entire piece was balanced and the legs were wrapped with florist's tape. I did improvise on the beak - it is not the beak as shown in the book.

I had a great time making him and am quite fond of him! He will have to be part of my own private menagerie since I won't sell anything made for another's patterns but this little project has inspired me to try to develop my own. I hope you like him! :)