Needle felted budgie picture

I was musing about making a needle felted budge,a little like this fellow, this yellow bird was one I made from a tutorial on Craftster If you haven't been on craftsters amazing forum pages,where have you been!!!!! Tutorials galore,inspiration posts about everyone latest crafty adventures and a great sense of community,Yay Craftster!!!!!!

Needle felted bird

I doodled a rough picture of a budgie but what I really wanted to do was play with my new Janome Embellisher. Ah lightbulb moment! Why not make a budgie picture! As I have played a little already,I know that felting onto premade felt is not a good idea. It gets a bit distorted by the Embellisher which is quite vigorous,especially if you stay in one place too long. I thought something more hard wearing like canvas would do the trick

I traced the picture onto canvas by sticking it on a window (my take on a light box)

This worked quite well as it was so sunny!!!

I then built up the colours,primarily with hand needle felting...

And then using the Embellisher to smooth and mix the colours. There is quite a bit of shrinkage involved so I had to keep re adding to the edges of the budgies body. At one point it got rather noisy and I realised that one of my needles had broken and was trashing the canvas underneath. I do not know if it was because the canvas material was a little too stiff or whether is was from my own over enthusiasm  !!! As I'm new to this it's hard to get the balance right between a base fabric that is hard wearing enough to take the repeated onslaught of the Embellisher (a quietly fierce machine!) and one that puts too much strain on the needles.

I continued adding to my picture using my hand needles and this is how far I have got at the moment