Making Miles of Binding

 

I found a 100% cotton, dark blue, twin size, fitted sheet at my local Value Village for $4.  I cut off the elastic, washed, dried, starched, then ironed it flat. I now had a ~64”x72” piece of fabric.  I carefully folded it in half lengthwise and ironed the fold.  It was still wider than my 24” ruler, so I again carefully folded and ironed it.

I then cut 3” strips to yield a 3/8” finished binding.  I ironed the folds out of the strips and stacked ‘em right side up.

I used a ruler to see the line of the needle.

• I marked it with tape on my kenmore

and a sharpie on my bernina. 

I used my walking foot and the guide to sew the strips together. I simply kept the angles in the two opposing corners on the guide.

  I set the stack of strips on my lap  right side up.

I put the first 2 strips right sides together at about a 90 degree angle.  I lined up the 2 opposite outside corners with the marked line and stitched, keeping it lined up.   I put  strip 2’s unsewn end face up and put strip 3 face down repeating the process of sewing the 2 strips together.  I continued in this fashion until the strips were sewn together, being careful to not get the binding twisted.  I snipped them apart and fed the now really long strip into a basket, checking as I went to be sure my seams all ended up on one side. They did. Yay!

As I fed the strip into another basket, with a rotary cutter and no ruler, I carefully cut off excess seam allowance. 

I then fed the strip back onto the first basket, ironing the seam allowance open as I went.

I ended up with about 1300 inches – slightly more than 100 feet. 

 

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Binding a Quilt Part 1

My cat Luna got me out of bed at 4 am, so I thought I’d use the time to research quilt binding online.  Previous to now, I have been making my own straight grain binding using a bias tape maker.  The result is a single fold binding I attached to the quilt by machine in one step.  The problems with this method are

• difficult to attach front and back at same time, sometimes requiring me to re-sew parts,
• single fold means a single layer of fabric means not as durable.

The traditional method is to machine sew the binding to one side and hand sew the other side. These links illustrate that:

• CrazyMomQuilts
• HeatherBailey
• Invisible Ladder Stitch for Quilt Binding
• Quilt Along 15: Making and Sewing Binding
• Making and Attaching Quilt Binding
• Binding with Elmer’s School Glue
• How to Bind a Quilt

I went looking for a 100% machine sewn binding. This is what I found:

• Machine Binding Tutorial
• How to Attach Quilt Binding by Machine
• YouTube – Quilting Binding Finished by Machine

These are miscellaneous links:

• Try This Quilt Binding Technique: Eliminate Corner Bulk!
• Single fold binding
• Double-Fold French Binding – Creating the Binding
• Self Binding
• QuiltPox.com Calculators
• Quilt Binding: Joining Ends, Marci Baker of Alicia’s Attic
• Binding a Quilt by machine – the corner
• Mitered Binding for Different Angles
• Finishing odd edges
• Facings: An Alternative to Traditional Bindings
• Moonlight quilters binding tips
• cutting bias strips
• Bias Tape: How To Make It & Attach It – Sew4Home