Song Bird - Allison Haggarty - "Bird on a Wire"

My inspiration is the song by Leonard Cohen - "Bird on a Wire".
I started to work from one of my own photos at first but then fortunately, before I had left the planning stage, I came across a lovely photograph by Kerrie Mathee.  We are both members of a Facebook photography group which does weekly challenges (the Trevor Carpenter PhotoChallenge group, to be exact).  One week the topic was "balance" and she caught a bird perched on a wire fence. She graciously gave me permission to use her photo for our challenge.

I used two "new-to-me" techniques in this piece.

The wire was done by painting strands of raffia black.  I laid out the pieces on waxed paper and used extra paint to hold the twisted junctions together. Once dry the wire fence was tacked to the background at the cross-over points and along the edges.

Another technique that I tried for the first time was to paint non-woven interfacing to make the bird.  I learned about this from Sarah Ann Smith during her episode of The Quilt Show  The big advantage, to my mind, is that it does not fray at all.  This makes it wonderful for raw edge applique.  And then there is complete freedom to draw your own motif.  So the bird was painted using Inktence pencils. (I'm not good at drawing so it took more than one try to get something looking reasonably like a bird LOL).  There is a bit of batting tucked in behind the bird for a bit of a three-dimensional effect  (not obvious in the photo) and there is one bead for a shiny eye.