The image kind of says it all, but long story short, I'm about 2/3 of the way through making a stuffed rabbit doll using twill and cotton for the main material. I have all of the pieces cut out already and the image shows three pieces I embroidered. A face, an arm, and a leg.

As you can see, I'm coming across a not so slight problem here. On all three pieces (actually, all of the pieces I'm working with), the edges of the twill pieces are starting to fray just by standing still. To complicate things further, on the arm (the piece with the bird) and the leg (the piece with the flower), I think I've embroidered the images too close to the edge.

Any idea how I can sew pieces together without A) covering up the embroidered pieces and B) have the stitching come apart because of losing edges? The only thing I can think of, to be honest, is to leave the arms and legs unstuffed to put as little pressure on the inner seams as possible.

Obviously logic tells me to scrap this project, start over again, with larger pieces and give myself more room to work with. But, I've come pretty far and I'm a pretty stubborn guy and I just kind of want to get this thing done. At this point, I think it's more important to finish, learn from my mistakes, and do better the second time around.

Also . . . I should probably re-learn embroidery because I can't remember a single honest stitch if my life depended on it.

Shout out to Dala,flac, _refugee_, and tacocat because you're all relatively crafty people and if you don't have the answers yourselves, you might be able to point me in some good direction.

Thanks in advance. Hope everyone will have a good weekend. Sorry for a pretty poor post here.