Adding Backing to your Wool Mat

Hi everyone, it's Lisa from Primitive Gatherings, and today I want to show you how to put the back on a wool mat. So the first thing that you're going to want to do if it hasn't already happened is you want to take the paper, the fusible paper, off the edge of your mat. And mine has already come off, so I just want to point that out, that it already has come off. And it usually happens when you're stitching, so don't be afraid to take it all off. As long as you're careful that if you ever would have to go back to the iron, that you wouldn't iron it to your ironing board. Alright so the first thing that you want to do is get your backing, and you want to give it a nice press. So I'm going to open it up, and with my steam iron, steam all the wrinkles out. You want to pick a homespun that is pretty much the same color as your wool background. Alright so this is a more dominant side, so I'm going to lay that down to be the outside of the backing, and then I'm going to smooth it out, and I'm going to lay my mat exactly in the middle or toward an end, whatever is fine. Just make sure that you have enough room everywhere, and sometimes you don't have a lot of room, so you just gotta make sure it all fits before you start pressing. And one thing I want to point out too is that if you have a lot of threads on the back, make sure because this is a lighter background, make sure you clip all those nice and close so you don't have a red thread poking through or seeing through. Alright now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the iron, and I'm going to start from the middle, and I'm going to go tiny little presses to the outside edge, and I'm going to just keep doing that all the way around my mat. And remember that the only place that there's fusible is on the edge, so I'm trying to press all the excess of the mat out to the edges. And you gotta be careful because we have knots on here, so you don't want to swipe sideways. I'm going up and down motions as I'm coming out. Alright, I think I got it good. You can always just go do the edge too, now that you've pressed everything out from the center. Alright, now we're ready to cut the edge. Alright now, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be cutting the homespun right at the edge of the wool, so I'm cutting the backing away. And it's okay if you get a little bit of the wool in there too, but you're just using that wool as a guide to cut away that homespun backing. So that's what it looks like as I continue to go all the way around and try to do long, smooth strokes instead of shorter, choppier ones. So the next thing I want to do is I want to fray check the edge of the homespun. And this is going to make sure that the homespun stays nice and smooth and intact instead of fraying. So fray check means it's going to not allow it to fray. So open this up, and I have cut off a little bit of the needle nose here, and you want it just so, you want to cut it just above where you can see that it's solid. And then I poke that little pin in it to keep the hole open. And then all I'm going to do is put like a really fine bead of it right on the edge of that homespun. And like I said, that'll protect it from fraying. And I'm going to go all the way around the whole mat like that.