Progress on Wool Bird Applique

My applique club met last week, so I had an enforced opportunity to work on my wool bird applique project.  And I surprised myself by working on it the other day, too.  It's amazing (not) how you can make progress on something just by spending time on it.

Here it is sitting on my applique station, after I cut out and pinned the berries, beak, and wing.  

At the applique club, I cut off a large chunk of the left side of the background wool.  It was too much to wad up in my hand when sewing, so I thought I was being clever.  Today when placing the berries, I realized I was a little too generous in the cutting-off department. 

Consequently I needed to place the berries above the bird's head, instead of off to the side.  I don't suppose that matters in the least.

 

The pattern didn't have a wing, but I wanted one.  

The edge stitching shows up nicely on most of the wool, but it's virtually invisible on the branch.  I don't have a lot of brown embroidery thread, and my choices were:

1. a perfect match, thus invisible
2. wildly off, and silly

The pattern told me to fuse my wool to the background, so I did.  I'm not doing that again.  For one thing, it didn't work very well.  And when the glue really stuck, it stuck in places I didn't want it to and therefore showed up my errors in cutting.  

The large space between the upper yellow and pink feathers is correct, per the pattern.  But for the bottom feathers, that was originally one large feather.  I cut it into two so I'd have more color variation.  Where I cut it, I created a tiny gap and this is where the darn glue decided to do a really good job of sticking.  I tried to cinch them closer with the stitching, but it didn't work.  

There were tiny gaps where all the other pieces met, but those let me snug them up.  Maybe I'll cover that miniscule gap with beads, or maybe I'll just let it go.

From back here you can barely see it.  And birds sometimes have space between their feathers.  Maybe this bird just got out of the bird bath and the wet feathers aren't all aligned and fluffed out yet.  Yes, I think that must be the case.