I have several pieces that need to be finished and framed in some manner. It would be handy if I always followed the same procedure but many times I like to show organic edges but my recent piece Sanctuary wasn’t going to work out well framed that way. I needed to crop it and then frame it. It is very thick as it has several layers of felt appliqued to felt. And I didn’t want it to stretch out of shape while I was sewing the edges.

I marked the edges first trying to keep everything square. You can see faint lines around the edges where I marked the line I was going to machine stitch. By machine stitching, I could hold all the layers together as some of the hand stitched edges were going to end up being cut away.

I stitched with a dark brown thread and followed my line. I stitched over it twice to make sure everything was holding together. To keep it even and straight, I added a heavy interfacing to the back and pinned it all together before stitching.

Once it was stitched around the edge, I trimmed off the excess with a rotary cutter. As you can see, I didn’t quite get the top edge straight. But it will have to do 🙂

Then I zigzag stitched all around the edge a couple of times. There were a few white bits of felt sticking out and I fixed that with the appropriate colored Sharpie marker. Now to mount it on a canvas or in a frame.

I could put it in this frame with a white mat but I feel that the white is a little bit too stark and it would look better with a slightly darker mat board. Or on a lovely piece of fabric that I don’t seem to have. I definitely need to dye some cotton fabric backgrounds for several pieces now.