Recycled Tweetie: Share a Bird Project

At the end of August, I posted off a bird to the ‪#‎AccessArt‬ Share A Bird Project.

All gifted birds are then posted out to schools to inspire groups of children to be creative. 

My 'Recycled Tweetie' is made from scraps of fabric and thread, embroidered using dissolving fabric, then the edges and eye were hand stitched. The aim of this bird is to encourage kids to recycle materials to give old scraps of fabric a new lease of life!

Recycled Tweetie

Today children from Grandtully Primary school in Perthshire received their bird!

Twitter post from the AccessArt project

For more details or to take part visit:

www.accessart.org.uk/the-accessart-share-a-bird-project/

Use up those scraps!

Sample side 1 - Heart shapes strung around the edging

The final week of the machine embroidery course. This session we learnt how to use dissolving fabrics. I was surprised to find that dissolving fabric is much like plastic in both look and feel. Once you've gathered up a bundle of old cotton and fabric scraps - it is the perfect way to make use of the bits you'd normally thrown away. I love this idea as it's recycling at it's best: making something beautiful from something you would normally throw away.

Sample side 2 - can you spot the central heart?

I practised embroidery flowing shapes on the machine, in the form of circles with a heart centre. Once dissolved, the heart centre was without something to bind to, so next time I'll remember to cover the whole surface with embroidery.

I'm going to use this to decorate my studio clock so this is very much work in progress!