Birds in my window

I’ve been working on some alterations to my living room window quilt and finally finished them last week. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s how it started:

The birds on the birch tree are something I silkscreened on the window quilt several years ago during a crafting party at a friend’s house. I have often thought that the quilt looked a little bare  with only that as decoration, but didn’t get around to changing it until  a few weeks ago when I got fed up with the window quilt bunching up like this every time I opened it:

( I didn’t think of taking a before picture of the bird window quilt, so I’m substituting one of my kitchen blinds.)

I realized  that I could solve the sagging problem by  quilting the center of the front fabric to the Warm Window backing that serves as the insulation. Before the project, it was only quilted around the edges.

So I made appliqués in various shades of brown to complement the silk screening that was already there. Then I arranged them on the fabric to decide where they would look the best:

It still looked a little empty,  so I texted my sister to ask her what she thought should go on the bottom. She suggested grass and more birds. I started working on the grass, then realized it looked a little like a marsh, so I printed out various silhouettes of herons to see how one would look  there. Here it is in the heron-testing phase:

I made the heron larger, then drew chalk outlines everywhere I wanted the appliques to go so I could quilt them in place:Finally, I machine quilted all the appliques in place, added a little bit of random quilting here and there, put the quilt through a gentle wash cycle, let it dry, and hung it back up in front of my living room window: