velvet dyeing, olive chilling, bird sewing saturday

The incongruity of olives in the snow on my English patio this morning. I took several chilly pictures to remember this coldness , as the warm breath of the Atlantic will be here tomorrow and Arctic ice will be gone.

This morning was spent playing with dyes. I bought some undyed silk velvet in a sale recently and decided to try some colouring today. I have wool dyes left over from spinning and thought they would work on the velvet-they are fine on silk. This is a piece at the dye painting stage-the colours are clearer here than after microwaving the piece. I think I will use it to make wings for a blue silk bird and  I may experiment with some brighter shades too. Perhaps a scarlet winged bird would be nice.

I doodled a sketch for the  piece I have in mind mentioned in the last post, using the John Gould illustrations as  models, but I will go no further until I have found or made the backing cloth I want to use. Instead, I started sewing another little bird-picture tomorrow-, and now I have  a new challenge. Nellie left me a comment and I have a hankering to try one of her birdy creations too.