Making a little birdie for my birdie shelf

What do we have here, a cute little easter chick decoration with white feathers? Perfect for...

...cutting off its wings and beak!

( Wait, what? D: )

I also cut off the backwards-pointing toe at the back of each foot, but those went into my spare figure bodyparts box before I took the photo. Tiny plastic sticks could prove useful for something, who knows.

I also cut little leaf-shaped pieces out of white printer paper.

Coloured them a little with pink pencil, and glued some actual feather fluff onto them. White faux fur or maybe pipecleaner fluff would have worked just as well, but I didn't have those on hand, and I did have a bag of (white, grey, and black) craft feathers from when I was making Dusk's figure and hadn't decided yet what to use for his down feathers.

Glued fluff on the chick, too, to give it a tail and make its face a bit less flat between the eyes. Face fluff is yet to be trimmed after the glue had dried, here. It's easier to glue on when it's longer so I can actually hold it.

To help hide the ends of the wire that were visible in the middle of the chick's face and on its butt, I added a tiny bit of white paint to them before gluing the feather fluff.

Covered my desk in said feather fluff (very important step, not optional).

Baked the tiniest little beans of glow-in-the-dark polymer clay. There are a few sizes to choose from, but even the smallest ones turned out to be bigger than I intended.

Plan was to paint the eyes (face shown here before gluing on the additional fluff), but I was going to do that after gluing the glowy beans inside the holes in the middle of the eye beads, and since the beans didn't fit inside the beads and covered more of them than I expected, the eyes ended up staying black so I don't get paint on the glowy clay. The eyes would have become red, but it's a dark red anyway, and I like the effect the glow-in-the-dark pupils have more than I care about 100% accurate eye colour.

Also not completely accurately, I painted the feet purple. They're green in the official design, but I like purple better for resemblance reasons.

I glued on the paper pieces, and with that, this little birdie has become...

a Little Birdie.

You can find more photos of the finished critter here at my site,
here at deviantart, here at tumblr, and here at cara.