Slow Stitching - sky, trees and ground fabric collage for my houses

I have been working on my fabric collage which will be the background onto which I will be hand stitching my little houses.  I did some research on fabric collages in hopes of finding a way to finish the edges of my fabric pieces in order for them to be solid and secure so this base would be strong enough to hold the houses once this piece is incorporated into a quilt.  I did not want to use fusible webbing because generally it creates stiffness and would make the handstitching of the houses more difficult.  I found this video tutorial called Edge Colouring Applique from Fourth and Sixth Designs which is a technique they developed to finish off their applique designs for their Full Bloom Block of Month quilt in 2014.  It was exactly what I was looking for!!!!!  I started with my brown strip.  I simply used this method to join my scraps to each other.  I had trouble with my tension when I used reverse and so it is a little wonky but I did not want to start over so I have decided to use as it is.  Its wonkiness will add to the texture of the background.  I did the green layer next and this time I chose to stitch all my scraps to each other using a single line of  straight stitch before I used this technique to "colour" the edges of my scraps.  This worked better.  I also changed sewing machines and used my Bernina 830 which worked much better.  The tension was good in both forward and reverse and gave me a good result with this technique.  I am really happy with how the green layer worked out.  As you can see the blue layer is a single piece of fabric which perfectly simulated a sky which is what I was looking for!!!! 

Check the images below for a close up of the stitching which I used to secure the edges of my pieces.  I simply laid my scraps over each other and the back and forth stitching of the technique securely attaches them to each other and also blends in the line of straight stitching I used to create the green collage.  This technique is a bit like free motion stitching and requires developing a rhythm to get it to go well.  Free motion stitching is also a technique they recommend for this "edge colouring" but I was not ready for a steep learning curve so I used this one that uses regular straight stitch instead. 

 

 Here is a portion of the finished piece with the three layers of the fabric collage attached in the same way as the scraps pieces were attached for the brown and green strips.  The blue is the sky, the green is the landscape/horizon line and the brown strip is the dirt/road in the foreground.  I expect this will not be used literally in that the houses will likely overlap all three layers.  They have yet to be invented.  That is work for another day. 
The first photo below is the finished fabric collage and then the bottom one has the bottom edge straightened in that it would be best to have the houses all sitting straight to the edge of the collage and perpendicular to it as well.  I would prefer not to have my houses looking like their are off kilter. 

So I will be working up pieces of houses next and will get back to slow stitching when they are ready to go.  I will be doing slow stitching in the day or evening for the summer to allow me to get a morning walk in every day.  Therese