This cute peacock is from a new book called Little Birds by Design Collective. It is a beautiful book filled with gorgeous projects centred on, as the title suggests, petite creatures with wings. The book is great eye candy even if you never made a thing from it.
At first, I was tempted to put the peacock (by artist Amy Adams) in the too hard category, but then I decided that I shouldn't be so wimpy. I sewed the whole thing by hand, which felt very zen.
The peacock in the book is a more traditional blue colour, but the body and front freathers called for pre-felted wool. I already had some lime and orange felted wool from Blooming Felt, so lime and orange it was. The spotted fabric used for the centre and back of the feathers is from a fat quarter set from Hobbycraft. The buttons were just from stash. The pattern mentioned for some sort of embroidery cotton I've never heard of (it's a US publication), so I just used two strands of my regular stuff for the sewing and a full six strands from the head plume.
I was actually quite pleased with how it came together. As usual, I ignored the instructions and sewed the eyes on before stuffing the body (I still don't get why many patterns insist you attempt to sew facial features onto a stuffed body). I used a double-dose of cardboard to stiffen my feathers after my first couple seemed to sag a bit. The head plumes went on et voila!
Now for my guilty secret. The peacock won't stand up by itself - it has to be propped against the wall to stay upright. The project clearly warns about the need to balance the feathers and I did use plastic pellets to weight the body, but it wasn't enough. It's not a massive obstacle as Prudence (as she's now called) can live out her days on a shelf with her back against the wall. I wasn't really prepared to undo my neatly sewn body to insert cement or whatever might have provided better balast for the feathers...
Still, a lovely project and I'm looking forward to tackling some of the other birdy ideas in the book.
Mel x
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