A "Clean" Raw Edge Pieced Background

Gaggle of Geese

I wanted to give a little information about how I made the background for this piece. Originally I planned to use a brown and tan background, but when I made a background with those colors, the geese did not stand out from it sufficiently, in my opinion. 

Here you see what I mean:

The goose just did not "pop" from those colors.

So,  I needed to figure out something different. I pulled fabrics out from my stash. I saw that blues looked very good next to the geese and started to throw the blue fabrics on the floor in a haphazard manner. Well that unplanned layout of blues looked really good, so I took a quick photo of it and used that as my design guideline.

I cut out the various rectangles of blues and laid them out. For the most part, I did not want to worry about turning edges under, so once I got them where I wanted them and pinned them down to a background fabric.

After positioning and pinning, I straight stitched them in place using my machine. I stitched close to the edge of the rectangles to do this. 

I did not want to have a lot of fraying on the edges, so after the sewing was done I carefully clipped the edges of each rectangle, and then used a brush to lightly apply a watered down solution of thread end glue to just the edge of the fabric.

 

This is the glue. I had an almost empty bottle of it and added a little water, shook it vigorously, and got a slightly tacky solution. I used an old small sparse brush to apply it. I dragged the brush along the edge of the fabric piece only, in the direction that made the threads lay down.  I was careful to avoid getting any of this solution on the top of the rectangle to avoid a "shiny" area of dried glue. This worked well to eliminate frays, and I would use it again. 

And that is my tip for doing a clean, raw edge pieced background. Thanks for visiting my blog!