birds of ... a feather?

So, I have a very talented sister who's designing a nursery for her baby-girl-on-the-way. It's hot pink, black and absolutely fabulous.

The room is filled with birds of all of the sweetest kind and my sister felt, after seeing some papier mache birds at Anthropologie, that it needed some of those too.

I agreed. But I thought to do them 3-D would be a bit sweeter, she agreed and so I ran to the dollar store pick up a bunch of little sparrows all covered in glue, feathers and fake eyes....so we could cover them all in papier mache ourselves.

Here's what we did to them to make them...

We started with a few sparrows and a Nancy Drew book I found at a garage sale for .25 cents that had been drawn all over with markers by it's previous owner.

my sister wanted to use these 3 RIBBA frames from Ikea; using the pages of the novel as a background and then perching the mache birds in the open frames.

I used a tape runner to cover the back of the page and then pressed it flat over the backing of the frame.

Here's the three frames, without their glass, ready for the birds.

After stripping the birds of their plastic legs and fake beady eyes, they actually looked cute in the frames as they were but we decided to take it another step further and make them more mod.

So we got rid of all the feathers by mummifying them in masking tape.

Here's my sister preparing the mache recipe which was very simple: Just 1/4 cup of flour, a pinch of salt and enough water to make it all creamy. (plus an extra little bowl of clear water for patting things smooth and re-wetting the glue)

We painted on the glue with a paint brush and then covered the bird in strips of white tissue paper until they were covered in several layers.

Here's the birds finished but with their tail feathers left intact (we couldn't decide whether we wanted to cover their tail feather, and I kind of liked the look of keeping them there.)

 My sister took home her frames and birds to play with them until she got them set up just the way she wanted, but my sweet little birds found a home on  my mantel, also with a stack of books (that will NEVER  be ripped up) These little featherless friends have been making me smile all day.

Hope they make you smile too! 

Have a great day!