Birdie

I am stressed and I'm anxious these days. I'm a pro at both, but this is no competition and even if it were, being the winner would be a pretty dubious honor.
Right now I'm just happy about my furnace not having gone out since Mr. Heater was here yesterday, for a slurpy kitty to one side - Gundel is the loudest groomer ever - and another one feeling like the weight of a standard sandbag on my feet which beats a weighted blanket and a hot-water bottle (no, he's not really as heavy as a sandbag, but cats manage to change gravity, I'm sure, still remembering how incredibly heavy Ponder's head on my wrist used to be).

I have two personal solutions for being stressed.
Sleeping to block out the world. Too bad if it creeps into my dreams, but usually they are just very weird and not nightmares ... snippets of the one this morning are coming back to me right now which make me wonder when I got a dog? There have been cats, from my own to huge lions and of course black panthers in my dreams, also other animals like wolves, but never a dog. Interesting.
The other one is hoping for my muse to jump in and give me not only an idea - I have enough of those - but also the energy to work on something.
If you are wondering, I know about those people who fight stress with cleaning their whole house, but I can safely say no amount of stress or worry in the world has ever managed to make me do that, despite my half-Swabian ancestry.

As my blog is mostly about crafting, I will not go into my dreams in detail, lucky you, but talk about my last piece.
This is the second bead embroidery piece that started out on my embroidery hoop. It also inspired me to write another nostalgia post, but I'm still waiting for something to finish that one, just this much, it's about shapes, as is my pendant.

Give me a drop and I will see a bird body.
It has happened before, in my paint cabochon and Cantera opal bird pin for example.

And this time it happened with a labradorite drop. This time, however, I wanted to be a bit less neutral with my colors. So I chose a light amethyst for the head, gold accents, and a bright purple as a contrast to the body.
Yeah, and then I was stuck because I put the head on differently than in the pin and couldn't decide if I wanted to add legs or not. I did some hand embroidery instead, but kept coming back to my birdie apologizing for leaving it on that hoop for so long. Then I worked on the sparkly heart and apologized to my birdie for leaving it in a drawer for so long. I'm weird, I really do talk to my WIPs and I often talk to myself while working on something because it helps me think.

When I finally got the bird back out of the drawer, we sat down for a serious talk ;-)
In order to make a decision about the legs, I first had to think about the tail. Did I want it short or long? Why did I even have to think about it, everyone knows I can't resist a fringe! Having a fringe for the tail, though, meant that dangly legs were out and Birdie needed something to perch on.

I beaded a twig and added some embellishments in form of blossoms.
As I planned to make the tail pick up the colors of the head with golden seed and matte amethyst beads, I wanted the twig to be more subdued using bronze tone flower beads topped with tiny amethysts. Birds have so many different colors and sometimes they only partially have bright colored spots to get attention; and I wanted him to get the attention, not the twig.
Also my first idea had been berries for the twig, but again I didn't want the colors to compete with the tail.

I guess Birdie is ready to fly!