a sewing question for the internets

I keep feeling there's some obvious way to make this simpler, but I don't know what. Maybe you, O Ever-Wise Internets, do.

I have a circular piece of fabric that needs be sewn onto the surface of another, larger piece. The circle is small (diameter ~3 inches) and has raw edges. Dealing with those is the issue at hand. Bonus points for a solution that minimizes the hassle if I have to remove the circle at a later date and transfer it to a new piece of fabric.

( Here are the possible solutions I've thought up. )

I really do feel like there's a smarter way to do this, but my sewing experience is limited enough that I don't know what it is. Help me, o internets; you're my only hope.

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: New Spring

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books from Knife of Dreams onward.]

It occurs to me that it's no longer accurate to title these posts "Revisiting the Wheel of Time," since from here on out I'm not re-reading stuff; I'm reading it for the first time. But calling them "Visiting the Wheel of Time" sounds odd, so we'll go with the parentheses approach.

The schedule, of course, has been one book every two months -- but Crossroads of Twilight being the wasteland that it is, and New Spring being so short (it isn't really; it's 122K, which is perfectly respectable, but svelte next to the usual doorstops), I decided to "double up" for this round. It was the right decision; there isn't really enough here to make me feel it would be worth that kind of pace.

It's an odd book, really, and occupies an odd position in the series: a prequel written while Jordan was mired in the deepest part of the bog. It started out as a novella, then got expanded to a novel; I know I read the original version, but don't remember exactly what it consisted of. (Did it start with Lan's arrival in Canluum? I feel like it might, since that starts with a line about "new spring," and it's also where Lan comes back into the story, after being largely absent for the first 200 pages.) Sometimes novellas get expanded by tacking on more material before or after -- and I'm pretty sure that's at least a big part of what happened here -- but I don't know if the novella material also got expanded or altered.

I'm also not sure who the book is intended for. New readers? There's so much in here that doesn't get explained in the least, like who the Aiel are and why the rest of the continent is at war with them; I don't even think the story gets around to explaining what exactly happened to Malkier until near the end of the book. Current readers? There's too much explanation of things that were made abundantly clear long ago, and on the flip side, there just isn't enough in here that's new -- that isn't expansion of things we'd already been told about in the main books.

( Is it possible for an author to fanfic his own work? )

I asked in the text of the cut-tag whether an author can fanfic himself. That's what New Spring comes across as, almost: canonical fanfiction. It picks up details from the text and tells a story about how they might have gone, putting flesh on those bones, just like I've seen people ask for in Yuletide prompts and the like. I have nothing against fanfiction (obviously), but in this context, I just find myself wishing this book had put together a new skeleton instead.

And from here we go to Knife of Dreams, at which point, for the first time since January 2003, I will finally resume forward motion through this story.