The making of Fly Away

Today I visited the Queensland Quilt Show, and was thrilled to see my quilt Fly Away hanging there!
I promised to write a bit more about the making of this quilt, so here goes. As you know, it started with this photo, made by the photographers of WinkiPoP Media at the Australian National Championships in Melbourne in May 2014:



I enlarged the photo using Block Posters and printed it:



Then I traced the different parts of the image and searched for matchings fabrics in my stash:



I used fusible webbing (Vliesofix) to iron the fabric pieces onto the background fabric:







With all the pieces fused in place the quilt was ready to be sandwiched. No sewing done yet!



Choosing the threads - I always use Aurifil threads for quilting:



And finally the sewing machine gets a workout! I started on the leotard:





Next some heavy free-motion quilting on the hands:



And on the rings:



Hmmm, not a good idea to do a lot of free-motion quilting before the surrounding area has been quilted.... Here a lot of unpicking was done:



After quilting the body and the rings I started on the background quilting. Again some unpicking was in order:



But finally I got it right:



I had been putting off quilting the hair as I didn't really know how to do that. Finally it couldn't be avoided any longer, and after another good look at the photo I decided to use two fabrics, to depict the light falling on Hugo's hair:



I am quite happy with the quilting I did here:



After finishing the background quilting (which took many, many hours) the quilt was ready to be cut to size:



A facing finish and a hanging sleeve were added:



Finished! Or not?



I wasn't happy with the the body and decided to add the sign on the back after all. I cropped the photo and printed the image below on fabric:



I cut out the sign and fused it to the quilt, then quilted it. I also added some more quilting to the body.



Finished!