I am making a baby quilt with hand applique animals. I am getting ready to do a bird and wondering how I can give the idea of feathers with the fabric. Hope this makes sense.

Janie

Can you post a picture of the bird?? I was thinking that you could stitch or quilt feathers on it...

Can you find a fabric that has a feathered pattern (lots of movement) in it?

Maybe applique a wing on it but make it so that it is not fully flat on the material - so you can lift up a corner of the wing ya know what I mean? That might give it a less flat, more feathery look.

You could also maybe do a bit of that raw edge applique and make the tail part raggy so make it look more feathery... I'm not a big fan of raggey quilts but I can see just the tail feathers being a bit raggy or something along that line as a possibility...

Just throwing out some brainstroming for you. Maybe someone else can run with the ideas and make them better or maybe it will trigger another idea...

Perhaps you can do a few layers of the fabric, one on top of the other. Or, you can choose a fabric that has different variations of the same color, and find different areas where you can fussy cut to the get colors you want to show variations in the wings. Does that make any sense?

I have seen a procedure where someone fused the fabric to interfacing and cut feathers and only fastened the top of the feathers to the body of the bird. Hope you find a yechnique that works for you. :lol: