Three Fairies (Panel Quilt) - DONE!

I really enjoy doing quilts from panels.  I found this one online a couple of years ago:

Here's the coordinating fabrics (from the same online source):

 I already had this orchid print, and the colours will work well as backing fabric.  I definitely wanted a "busy" backing fabric because I planned to do free-motion quilting on this project, outlining the fairies, butterflies and flowers in the panel.

It actually took me about 2 years to get the courage up to do this one, but once I got started - it was such a FUN project!

Here it is finished:

And here's the backing

On the center (the panel) I opted to stitch around the elements of the image, the fairies, butterflies, leaves and flowers.  Not wanting the quilting to be too busy, I just outlined some of the elements of the panel, leaving a little more blank space than usual.

In the image below, you can see I've outlined the leaves, butterfly, and flowers on the left.

And on the image below you can see I traced around the fingers of the fairy and around the butterfly.

Click any picture on this post to see a larger image

Here's a closeup of the backing.  You can somewhat make out the pattern of stitching, but because the fabric of the backing is so bold and "busy", it pretty much masks out the stitching - exactly what I wanted.

And I got just a little braver - on the quilt top, there are 6 blocks of pink fabric which are more-or-less plain.  I decided to try free-motion stitching a dragonfly in each of those.  They turned out pretty well!  Here's one of them:

I can't wait to do another free-motion panel quilt.  This one was terrific fun!