Thank you for all the great ideas, you ladies always come through.
As for the decorative stitches, with Christmas bearing down I don't have the time or the expertise to try this.
I like the label idea (can you buy them at JoAnns?).
Many of the pieces were done by hand and some by machine, so the 1/4 in allowance could have been missed.
The rest of this story is almost comical. I cut the backing forgetting about the border so I had to splice another piece on but after stitching in the ditch you can't tell I did that. I had sewn the spliced piece of the backing on wrong, sewn the border on backwards. I did a lot of bad words with this project!
Pat