I made a Pixel Portrait Quilt of Tom Hiddleston - Need help finishing
Hello there! I am new to the forum and also new to quilting. This quilt top is my first quilt I've ever made. I wanted to do a photorealistic portrait of Tom Hiddleston (the actor who plays Loki in the Thor movies) so after a year of hard work and lots of cutting I finished it. This quilt measures 100 x 100 inches (king size) and is made up of 40,000 1-inch squares which are 1/2" finished. I used 250+ different fabrics of mostly semi-solids and fine patterns in my palette.
However, because this is my first quilt, and the piecework is so dense, I have no idea how to finish it. It's difficult to show through photographs, but the quilt is extremely heavy, and stretches under its own weight when held up. It's unstable while unfinished, so it needs some sort of support.
I've heard suggestions of long-arm quilting, and also not quilting it at all and just stabilizing it and hanging it. Any advice is very welcome.
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If you have any questions about my process, I would be happy to answer them. Although I must warn you, I am self-taught, so I sort of made up words for the terms that everyone else seems to know.