The Eggs Came First: Rubber Stamping a Quilted Chicken "Thank You"

A weird thing I've discovered living just ten miles from downtown LA is that loads of people keep backyard chickens! If you drive through some neighborhoods early in the morning, you can hear the cock-a-doodle doo's! 

The urban farmers include one of my DH's colleagues; he and his wife regularly gift us with a dozen beautiful eggs, in assorted sizes and colors. I truly never knew a plain old unseasoned egg could taste so good. 

This is my thank you gift to them. The message is one they included in a note that came with one of their kind deliveries. They adapted it from milk commercials. It reads, "Happy Chickens Lay Great Eggs." 

I rubber stamped the words onto vintage bias ribbon. Rubber stamping is incredibly easy to mess up, so it's a good idea to stamp out duplicates, just in case. Here's how they looked right after stamping. 

 

Both versions came out okay, except "chickens" in the third strip down has a shadowed "I", so I didn't use that one. To prevent ravelling at the ribbon ends, I dripped a bit of 'Fray Check' on each. Once it dried, I hand-sewed them in position with thin thread and a running stitch.

I also did a little hand-quilting with perle cotton, wending my way through the raw eggs (above) and the fried ones (below).

The chickadee on the right is from a vintage border fabric that I suspect is from the 1960s or 70s.

I used the ink pad below, "Crafter's Acid-Free Pigment Option Pad," by Color Box. In theory, after heat setting, it should be permanent. 

I've had the pad for  years; and I keep it stored in a sealed plastic bag - so most of the colors still stamp out quite well. (Can you buy the same thing today? I searched but couldn't find this particular configuration online - but I did find very similar pigment stamp pads from Color Box, one of them with the eight colors arranged like a flower.)

For the letters, I used these tiny, quarter-inch, adorable stamps. 

(I accidentally stamped the wrong end of the "E" into the pad, and it may never recover.) The brand is Studio G, and they still make these! 

The green chicken is from a fabulous African fabric gifted to me by my friend Alexandria (Thank you!) The back of the piece shows what it looked like before I surrounded it with eggs! 

So which came first, the chicken or the eggs? In life, the eggs came to us first, but in this wallhanging, I started with the chicken in the center, so I'd say the question is still up in the air!