Lorikeet

Here's another bird that reminds me of Singapore. 

This is a Rainbow Lorikeet, which is native to Australia but also lives in its  neighboring countries. In Singapore's Bird Park, there is a large enclosure in which you can interact with and feed lorikeets and lories (slightly larger, with shorter tails). The girls have done this a couple of times on our visits to Singapore.

Anyway, I was visiting on the phone with my brother in Australia some time ago and we got to the topic of native critters that run amok and sometimes are pests. We have raccoons and coyotes and squirrels, among other things, I told him. Where I live, we have lorikeets and ibises, he replied (the lorikeets, as I understand the situation, aren't anywhere as nasty as the ibises, plus they're gorgeous). While I didn't feel inspired to make an ibis, I did think it could be fun to  make a lorikeet - if nothing else, to see how many colors of fleece and felt I could combine in a single project.

And they are fantastically colorful! 

Now all flying birds are aerodynamic in their own way, but when I think of parakeets and lorikeets with their long tails, I visualize them as especially streamlined compared to the smaller, chunkier birds I see in my backyard, like finches and chickadees. To better represent the more streamlined profile of this lorikeet, I laid out and cut the fabric pieces with the stretch in the head-to-tail direction rather than wing-to-wing. I mentioned this orientation in this hummingbird post.

Getting all the colors together was simply a matter of layering one over another.

I counted 13 colors! I had a absolute blast sewing this.