Insect Quilt Back

I'm going to try and be brief tonight since it's a bit late. Quick update on Theo's insect quilt. I finished the front on Monday (it's looking good, but you'll have to wait for the whole quilt to be finished to see it properly, you can see half of it here in my previous post). Yesterday and today I've been working on the back. I wanted to make the back quite personal in some way and decided to have a go at doing a picture of Theo on there. It seemed like a good idea at the time!

I used this photo from the Summer as my inspiration.

It's a photo I love and it's a very typical Theo stance. I also thought it might be relatively easy, given that it's mainly in silhouette, and I could see how I could adapt it to an insect themed picture. I drew the outline on bondaweb, ironed it on to a plain white piece of fabric and cut it out carefully. Then I ironed it on to a different white piece of fabric - the shades are slightly different so the outline stands out a little. And then I machine embroidered around it and added some detail - hair, eyes etc. I didn't do very well taking photos but here it is slightly further down the line.

The bondaweb process transposed the picture.

I added grass and a dragonfly for Theo to be intent upon, and I thought I'd better give him some clothes and pop his name on there - just so people actually realise it's supposed to be him! (You can see a wet patch around his name in the photo above, I'd just rinsed off the soluble pen marks I'd used to guide my sewing.)

Here he is a bit closer.

I found it very difficult to capture a really good likeness in such a simple, black and white, line drawing. I was itching to put some paint on there to help me, but unfortunately I didn't think that was a good option on a quilt that will need washing regularly. I was very tempted to try and add some shading with more stitching too but I wasn't confident enough that it would improve things so I decided to keep it as it was. It's not perfect but I do see a little bit of Theo in there (Maria didn't help matters - when I asked her who she thought it was she went through about 10 different people before suggesting Theo!).

Today I've been building up from the picture to create the whole quilt back - mainly log cabin style. I like the way it kind of frames the picture with this design. Here are a few photos of the process.

I managed to incorporate some of my reject wonky blocks into the plan, the ones I quite liked!

And I finally got it finished late tonight. I'm afraid I found it almost impossible to take a photo of it laid out on the floor. It's too big and there was no one else awake to hold it up for me. So the angle on this photo makes it look pretty weird...

But it does actually look really good and I'm happy with it. Only problem is, his birthday is tomorrow. I've got about 4 hours during the day when I'm child free and I can ignore all housework and try and get it finished. But I'm not sure that'll be enough to put it together, quilt it and bind it. Especially as it is so large. And especially as I don't know how I'm going to quilt it yet - how I'd like to quilt the back isn't at all how I'd want to quilt the front, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I'm going to sleep on it and hope I wake up with a solution.

I might skip a post tomorrow (unless by some miracle I get the quilt finished and photographed - don't hold your breath!) so most likely I'll be back Friday with a photo for the week.

Sally.

PS Linking up with a slightly late WIP Wednesday over on Freshly Pieced.