making lemonade...I hope

I quilted the last piece of the big dye. It seemed kind of meh. I discharged some barbed wire on it, that helped a little. I decided I wanted birds sitting on the wires, but kind of ghostly birds, more the idea of birds. So I cut some bird shapes out of black Misty Fuse and fused them on:



Kind of what I was looking for, but I disliked the sheen of the fusible--maybe at that point I should have tried to just remove the fusing. I didn't. I just kept plowing on down the row:


Fusible web, meet fake metal foil. In one way I liked them, but they were kind of gaudy. Bold, distracting, shiny. Move on to black paint to dull the surface:



That black line along the left isn't a shadow. It's where the paint bled out onto the surface. Oops.

Next came a pause of a couple of days coming up with other options. One of them, which seems to have won the day, is this:



Don't like it? Cut it out, finish the edges. Actually, this is an improvement. But if I leave it an open space, I'm dependent upon the color of the wall the piece is hanging on. Not a good option. So I added some black scrim:



Nice. But why stop there (btw, my inner voice seems to be strangely silent these days; perhaps she's still on vacation), keep on digging into the hole. I put Paper Solvy behind the hole, and started stitching away with various threads:



I've now removed the paper, and the piece is still wet so it doesn't photograph well. But I think it might work. Still have 6 other birds to do if I go for it, but at the moment I have no idea where this piece is going.

I still retain one of my other options, cutting into several smaller pieces...