Death of a cocky, birth of a flamingo!

Well after applying myself to making some lovely pink feather murrini (and some white with yellow for sulfur crested cockatoo's I will use later) I spent quite a lot of time making a very busy and quite large Pink Major Mitchell cockatoo bead......... it broke!!!! I think it was a combination of working a bit too large, being obsessed with the small details and not keeping the whole thing evenly warm..... and using one of my old mandrels that had the cheap crappy bead release on it (kept for making spacers ONLY).

After feeling "in my waters" that there could be issues with the cockatoo, one of which was just too much detail and very busy looking even before it went into the kiln, I thought I might make something else that required pink feathers........ a flamingo! I really slapped this one together, but yet, the kiln gods were pleased and this is what came out!!!!

Parrot prototype using rainbow feather murrini

Now, whilst I was in my recent murrini-fest obsession (still not out of it to be honest) I was going to make a parrot head murrini. I have in fact made parrot murrini before, early on in my murrini making career (if you can call it that) and after the gorgeous Jan Cahill showed me a beautiful bead made by the VERY talented Kim Fields I wanted to make myself a parrot bead in the Kim Fields style too. Sooooo..... rather than invest loads of time in making a parrot head (which would look rather two dimensional on a 3D parrot) I made some rainbow feather murrini which is fast and easy to make!

I had to force myself not to look again at the bead Jan showed, I did NOT want to copy in any way, but only use the memory of the bead for inspiration and this is what I came up with (and got out the kiln this morning).I am quite pleased with the look of the bead, but feel that I can make VAST improvement on the placement of the green feathers and the colour of the rest of the parrot. You can see the rainbow feathers on the back look quite good, but I am also thinking that I need to make some feather murrini with different colour combos to more accurately imitate real life parrot colours! I do think the murrini would have looked better with the Pea Green as the end colour and therefore show more of that colour which would blend better with the rest of the green feathers!

Oh well, live and learn. I am thinking that I might try to make some pink graduated feathers and apply myself to making a Major Mitchell pink cockatoo! I was also thinking that some pink feathers would look good on my mate's (Maxine - glass by girlfriday) Pink Flamingo's.