Sewing together 9 shadow selfies

I made 9 small (12" x 12") quilts that were all shadow selfies as a series.  I previously wrote blogs about all of these little pieces.  They were exhibited at my solo show in October 2018, but they haven't been entered in the Clark County Quilters show yet.

I was inspired to group them together into one quilt after I saw a grouping put together by Lynn Czaban of the portrait quilts she made of the Vagabonds.  She used zippers and tabs to sew hers together.  Here's a photo of that quilt:

Although the zippers were an unexpected and fun way to sew some of them together, I'm just not as talented as Lynn is, so I decided on adding tabs only. Here is my sketch of the idea:

I used black fabric (with a stabilizer on the back) and sewed with decorative stitches and couched yarn and trimmings on top.  

Here is what that looked like before I cut it into tabs.

After I cut the strips into the tabs, I placed them on plain black fabric and satin stitched (zig zagged) around all the edges.  I used a machine setting of 3.4 mm width and .4 length.  

To keep the corners from fraying, I added a dot of  fray check, let it dry, then cut out the tabs.

I placed the tabs between the little quilts and stitched right through the binding and the tabs.  I like the effect that this has given the grouping.

I hope you like it and will try grouping smaller pieces into a larger one for exhibit.  

OH, and P.S.  It costs $10 to enter a quilt into our show.  Sewing these 9 quilts together is going to save me $80!