Selvage Stick People Tutorial

As promised, here's the tutorial for the selvage stick people like the ones I made for my Love-Serendipity-Family Quilt. This just may be my favourite use of selvages yet! This is more of a method tutorial than anything with exact measurements, as improvisation is part of the fun.

My apologies that some of the text on the photos isn't showing the best. Everything looked great until I loaded the pictures into blogger. I will clarify below the photo for anything that is hard to read.

So here we go! First, the supplies you'll need ...

Fabric with heads to fussy cut.
Scraps of background fabric. Solids work best I think. If you make a stick woman, you will need a teeny scrap of fabric for the skirt. You should have white thread as the stitching on the selvages will show.
And the key ingredient, selvages ...

And now to get to the making part ...
Prepare your selvages by trimming each so just 1/4 inch of fabric is showing above the white. You really only need a few small selvage strips, but prepare a few extras to give yourself some choice and have back-up in case you make a mistake.


Set your selvages aside and fussy cut the heads you are going to use. Cut them out into a square or rectangle for easy piecing. Be sure to cut 1/4 inch more than the part you want to show, all the way around. If you don't have any head fabric, you could use plain white fabric and draw on a face, or even laser print an actual photo of a family member onto fabric and use that.

Cut background scraps for the body. You will need a leg section and an arm section.

Cut selvages for the arms. Let the ends of the selvage go right off the edge of the fabric as you will be trimming later anyway. Carefully trim the edge that meets the middle line at an angle. When you lay the selvages out to sew them on, be sure the guideline is centered beneath each one.

Sew the arm sections on. Topstitch (regular stitch) really close to the edge of the selvage all the way around. It is like raw edge applique, except the great thing about selvages is that it isn't a raw edge, it is finished.

Be sure the leg selvages overlap at the top for a nice skinny waist for your stickperson.

Now it's time for final adjustments. Press and trim. Trim the sides to adjust the arm length. Shorten the legs by trimming too, if you like.

So that makes Mr. Selvage Stickman ... here are a few little adjustments if you want to make Ms. Selvage ...

Cut a little triangle scrap for a skirt.

Sew two little selvage strips for legs. The skinniest selvages you have are best. Make sure the legs are not wider than the bottom of the skirt.

Piece your stick person into a background. Voila! Now, add these into your quilt, pillow, placemat, mug rug ... the list goes on.

If you make any selvage stick people I would LOVE to see them.

Also, if you use this tutorial to make these and post your results online, please link to this tutorial as your source, since this is my original idea and content.

Thanks for stopping by. Happy Selvage Quilting!

I'm linking up with {Sew} Modern Monday , Made by You Monday and Fabric Tuesday.