Bye Bye Blackbird

My local fibre arts group is doing a "round robin" this year.  Basically, you make a block and then it gets passed around to other group members for a year, each of whom will add another block to it. 

I loathe to make a piece specifically for this challenge with so many partly finished things lying around here, so I went through my "unfinished projects" box and found something I could use.

oh no he has no legs!

In that great big box of unfinished stuff, I spotted a large piece of hand painted fabric that I had tried free motion stitching on a few years ago when I knew little about free motion.  It's messy.  It's bunched up between all the stitches. It's embarrassing to even think about putting this piece out where other people can see it, but there's something endearing about it and I can't bring myself to just throw it in the garbage.   I hope whoever gets to work on it next forgives me for giving them something with so many flaws.

I cut it down to the size required for the round robin and I'm submitting this as my starting block.  With a bit of paint and some Paintstik, I turned a badly stitched tree branch into a badly stitched tree branch at night with songbird.  I really like the way this turned out.  Makes me want to go back and start over now that I know I could stitch the tree more successfully since I did it the first time.  

Anyhow, there's no time for starting over right now.  This block is going away tonight.  Maybe somone can give it some TLC and make the problem areas less noticeable.  Who knows.  Bye-bye little black bird.  See you next year.