As there are a lot of bird spotters among my friends and family, I’ve had quite some appeals for knitted birds. So I’ve taken up the venture of cloning different species in a knitted collection. Creating these hummingbirds has been an especially thankful task in these times of social distancing: hang up these birds all over the house and go bird watching without even leaving the house!

Hummingbirds can be divided into kaleidoscopic groups with thrilling titles as topaz, emerald, bee, coquette, mango and brilliant. There are 4 hummingbirds in the pattern: the white-necked jacobin, ruby topaz, tufted coquette and long-tailed-sylph. So from all the diversity in shapes and shades, pick and mix your hummingbirds to knit.

These birds make great, colorful hanging ornaments, for your Easter branches for example!

The hummingbirds were knitted on 2.25 mm dpn (UK 13, US 1) with small amounts of yarns - about 13 m per bird. So a hummingbird is a great project to use up any scraps you have lying around. Using a thread of metallic sewing yarn in your knit gives the hummingbirds their signature iridescence.
Each bird is an easy, small project, that can be finished in an evening or so.
The birds are about 7 cm in size and require some intarsia color work, short row and i-cord knitting and loop stitches (explained in the pattern). The beaks were done with tooth picks and lace gauge yarn on thin dpn. I’ve added quite some detail to these hummingbirds, but you can opt to skip or change some of those.

Have fun on knitting adventure and your in-house bird watching tour!