I participated in my second Phat Quarter swap, this time the theme was “five.” I did the science swap back in May, and I was excited to do another. I signed up right away but had absolutely no idea what to do so I kept putting off working on it. The deadline was getting closer and closer so I finally made a decision to do five separate pieces. My swap partner said she liked birds so I decided to do a series of them.

My original plan was to do the same bird five ways; cross stitched, embroidered, felt… I thought conceptually it was a cool idea, but creatively I was having trouble coming up with five distinct ways to do it, and I worried they wouldn’t all be successful or wouldn’t work as a cohesive unit. The first one I did was the goldfinch, and I loved how it turned out and immediately knew that I wanted to do all five cross stitched. The birds are, in descending order – oriole, robin, bluebird, cardinal, and goldfinch.




I really hope my partner likes these because I am so pleased with them. Each bird is in a 4 inch hoop, so they are pretty small, but I think they all work really well together. I want to stitch more birds soon!