Best Borders!! All of the rules, tips and tricks to finish your quilt!

hi my name is Cindy rang with the fabric patching afraid of Washington and today we're going to talk about borders borders borders are critical to the completion of your quilt people think that they made it through all of the blocks made it through all of the piecing maybe even all of the applique and then it's smooth sailing after that which is true but if you don't put your borders on correctly you can ruin not ruin but you can affect all of your hard work I say that as a long-arm quilter somebody who if you bring your quilt to me and you want me to finish it we have to make sure that it absolutely lays flat the other thing that will happen is sometimes you'll give a gift to somebody a quilt and you'll think that they're gonna put it on the bed and when you go over to their house you find that it's hanging on the wall so if it's hanging on the wall but it's hanging a little skewed because the borders are on they're funny you're not gonna like that so we're gonna talk about that we're kind of gonna talk about the math involved with borders so we're gonna do a little bit of work on paper and then we're also going to talk about color because there's two reasons that we do borders we do borders for color to be able to either add more of the color that we want or downplay one of the other colors or to use a focus piece of fabric that we have the other reason that we use borders is we use borders because when we got our quilt finished it wasn't the size that we thought it was or it wasn't big enough I've even made a queen-size quilt for somebody only to find out that from the time I started to the time I finished it they now have a king-size quilt a king-size bed so I'll show you how to fix all of those things the other thing I want to mention is that if you've been doing the row sampler class with us this is actually class 12 of 14 we didn't label it that way in the YouTube description because we think that borders are just a universal knowledge that every quilter has to have and we're not really talking as much about our rows today as we are our borders so if you've been working on your row sampler then sorry I think I jiggled if you've been working on your ro sampler now would be the time if you feel like you want to make it bigger maybe you got your ro sampler done and it's smaller than you thought and you really want to make sure that it fits your bed these are some options for you to be able to go ahead and make it bigger so if there's a quilt that you're working on sometimes that's what determines your rows I mean your borders is the fabric that you have left so if you have a bunch of pieces left and maybe you were sparingly using this one because this one was your favorite one well now is the chance to go ahead and add it in a border to feature it in something and if you've learned a lot of different rows along the way all of those rows can become borders the other thing that you can do is if you just have a lot of weird little leftover pieces there's some great things that you can do to use up those leftover pieces and so I'm going to show you a couple different options the other thing is if you've watched any of our previous videos you would know that I am really not a rules person I kind of feel like there's a few rules that we have to follow in order to make sure that everything turns out great and as expected but most of the time you just kind of need to have fun with it and we can fix it in the end and it's all going to be okay when it comes to borders there are two rules that we do need to discuss one is that you have to measure your borders but and pin them before you sew them on and that's what we're going to talk about in a few minutes the other rule is that no border should be bigger than half the size of the block if that doesn't make sense I'm going to show you that as we go through but if you've got a twelve inch block that you made and let's say that you made only twenty blocks so you have four across by five down and you realize that that twelve inch block ended up making a quilt that's about you know 45 by by 50 and you really needed it to be twin size if you add a order that's 14 inches all the way around to get that quilt the size that you want it's not gonna look right what's gonna happen is it's gonna look like you put this massive border on this quilt because you didn't make enough blocks which is exactly what happened and so what you have to do is you you can add 14 inches worth of border but you just have to break it up so those are the two rules rule number one measure pin then sew and rule number two no borders should be bigger than half the size of that pieced block and again we'll show that so I think before we draw on the board let's just do a little bit of show-and-tell I'm just going to show you a couple of options so I'm gonna stand up for this okay let's start with this one so this is just a basic quilt just an applique hand-stitched quilt and you can see that this border really was not used within the quilt which is okay it kind of gave a nice frame to it and also the size didn't matter so much because this is just a simple little throw quilt it all could also could be one that hangs on the wall but it's really just something to add a frame to it and same idea and again I just want to show you that this one the fabric was not used I don't think within the quilt but you can see that it has enough to do with the rest of it that it's all okay this is a pretty large border but there's a lot going on on in this fabric and it's still only half the size of the size of this block so it's not massive and you can imagine if this border were this big it would just be overpowering and you wouldn't see as much of the cute quilt this is a little pocket it's kind of a cute little little quilt this one is borderless so this one this is called Diamond candy it's also it's just a variation of our dumpster-diving pattern and so for this one all I did was it was all about these fabrics in here so what I did is my border is just the same as my background and even my binding is the same so a lot of people think that there's a rule that you have to end with a dark border or a dark binding you can decide for yourself it's not necessarily a rule that I follow but I do think sometimes it can look odd if you have a dark quilt and then suddenly you have kind of a pale border it almost makes it look unfinished so you know like you didn't outline it so you can think about that this particular one though everything was light so the binding made sense so that's just a an option this one this is a Momo fabric so all it is is a big piece of fabric that we loved and get it right side up it's pretty large and what we started with was this piece of fabric which is the classic vintage you can't find it anymore but it's a Momo fabric and we just wanted to make a quilt out of this fabric the centerpiece and we wanted to add a couple of borders to it so this is just an example of every time we added this border we measured we knew exactly the size of that border and if you look at this as I hold this up you can see this is a perfectly square or it's rectangle but I mean there's no wow in the border when I hold it because everything was measured and it's interesting enough because there's enough color going on it's probably a little wild maybe but but there's enough stuff going on where we don't have just one great big huge 16 inch border which might look a little odd so instead we've got 2 inches 4 inches 2 inches and I think that this one is 7 so we've got enough interest that you can see that there's added borders and at the end I'm gonna add some pictures we used to do a class that we called I think we called it block swappers and what it was was we all made blocks brought things in and then everybody added weeds we would trade and everybody would add borders to our quilt so I would have some buddies and have their bag of fabric and I would add their border I'd put everything back in the bag and then when we came to class we would trade again no one would ever see it and we would trade somebody else would do a border we would trade somebody else would do a border and and then finally at the end of the five months or however long it took we would all get our quilts back so I have three or four of those I'll add those pictures at the end and you'll be able to see how interesting it is when you can take something that's fair small and then with all of these different borders how you can turn something pretty large and make it extremely interesting because it's all about the borders so all that those at the end and you can see those this one was just a simple quilt that started out with just some five inch squares so we sewed how many are there probably about 40 together in the inside and then put a border on so more together and then put a border on so it's more together and then put a border on so again you can keep doing this as much as you'd like to as long as you're measuring everything and everything is the right size to make sure that your quilt is square when you're done with it this quilt we're doing a second video today that should load right after this one that is quilt smart we kind of felt that it needed to be a separate class because it's a little bit involved in it's about twenty minutes but we want to show you how you can take a fusible product super super simple and just iron on a border and that's what this is so we're gonna show you how to do this so this same thing this is just a really cool fabric that we just like this is just one piece of fabric and then we pieced a border here and then this is that quilt smart this would be very difficult to piece there's all sorts of things that would be involved in that but instead what we did is we just used an iron on interfacing and laid it down fused it down so super simple and we're gonna show you how this works so if you want something that's a little bit fancier and more colors and a little easier this is an option so we'll show you that process and then the last one that I want to show you we'll talk about is this piano key there's a couple this was the example of the queen-size quilt that then had to become king-size so I had to come up with 20 well a total of 42 inches worth of border after the quilt was made so this is the star stepping quilt so this is the quilt and you can see 42 inches worth of borders so that meant 21 inches on one side 21 inches on the other and the block size even on point the blocks aren't that big so as long as I did this is a two and a half inch border this is ten inches and this is pretty large for a border but because there's a lot going on again like we showed in that colorful one you can get away with a little bit bigger because there's a lot to look at and then this is a four inch and this is a four inch and so but there wasn't anything else that we could do short of making more blocks and again that's what you want to think about is that if your quilt is too small because you didn't make enough blocks you either need to be very creative with your borders or make more blocks if you don't have any fabric left out of what you've been doing then it's possible that making more blocks is really not the option all right so what we're gonna do the other thing we want to do is we want to show you how to measure a bed and so we're gonna go to one of the retreat rooms and we're going to show you how to measure a bed we've come out to our event center and retreat center to go ahead and measure a bed we thought we would just give you a quick little tour of one of condos this one is actually condo number one all of them are designed at the same they all are 2-bedroom 2-bathroom you can find more information on our website at wwlp.com fern and so so anyway and this is the other bedroom and no light on in there but the other bathroom washer/dryer behind that door so we're gonna measure this bed okay so ideally when you measure a bed you have to have a hundred and twenty inch tape measure and you should have a second person with you you don't really have to but what's nice is if you have a second person what are you gonna do is toss them in the end and then you stand on this side and then you can tell them where you want the tape to go you can say oh I want to go down to the bottom of the bed frame I want to go all the way down to the floor I want to go to the bottom of the mattress because I have a dust ruffle whatever is that you have you have them hold the tape on that side and on this side you hold the tape so that you can hold on to that and say okay what I need is 80 inches and so you know exactly what the measurement is because you're you know that they're holding it in the same place if for some reason there you don't have a second person of course you can position where you think you want to go over position it come back and do the same thing so then you have your width for your length you have to make a couple decisions so again you have a nice long tape measure you have to decide what you like I tend to like to just have my quilt finished because I like to have pill it's like pillows but if you want to have a pillow tuck you're just going to want to figure that out so bring that up how much room do you need for your pillow tuck and figure that in once you have that you're gonna do the same thing you're going to come down same thing to the end or whatever it is the end of your frame or wherever you were so that you know that measurement which on this one is 106 so make that decision I again tend to start at the edge of the pillow too many blankets up here for me when I have my hope as a pillow tuck and then I come down and sure enough then I'm at 84 so that's how you measure a bed everybody's different you can think that it's just a twin bed but does it have that pillow top does it have a thick mattress is it high off the ground what kind of a box-spring does it have so it is best if you know what bed you're making your cohort to go ahead and measure it okay so now that you know how to measure your bed we all know what your finished quilt size needs to be but let's back up for just a minute and let's talk about just a basic border on a basic hope and it doesn't matter and this this tends to be kind of dry but it's very important that you understand this process you won't like your results if you don't do it this way and that's why we're just gonna do it kind of on paper and pencil or in this case dry erase board because it's super important because there are a couple videos out there and even somebody that I really respect that has done a ton of them and she just takes these borders and she lays her border on her quilt so is it down cuts it off those on the next one cuts it off so Zhaan the next one cuts it off you do not want to do that and I'm gonna show you why so let's just say that your quilt is whatever it is and it kind of doesn't matter so let's say that here's your quilt and it doesn't have to be any specific size for your bed let's just say life is good the way that it is you're going to throw it on your couch and all you're gonna do is that one little border just like that first snowman quilt that I showed you so let's say that that your quilt is 60 by 70 and and you just want to put on a four inch border well what you need to do is you need to take your extra along your 120 inch tape measure that we've already talked about and you need to measure your quilt so if you measure across the top and let's say that we actually do get sixty inches also mail measure across the bottom what if across the bottom you get what's a five backwards means that back is that right 15 writing upside down is you know it's all my years in the medical field and explaining lab levels to patients but anyway so so the top of your quilt is 60 inches the bottom is 59 and on this side and and that's normal if you're within an inch that's good don't feel like that's bad that that's that's fine and then let's say on this side of your quilt is 70 inches because we've measured with our long tape measure and let's say that on this side let's say that it's 71 again perfectly normal that's what's going to happen so so what will happen is if you just decide to sew on borders so let's say that you have all of these strips you've sewn all of these together and you're gonna sew this on and cut it off so on the next one cut it off so on the next one cut it off and you're just gonna keep going well what will happen is if we look at kind of an exaggerated view this top is longer and this side is longer than this side and this side so so we've already got kind of this little Wow in the top so if you keep adding orders on it's going to grow with every border you add this happens every time there was a quilt that I got to quote for somebody that they brought in for me to quilt she had six borders on it I could not get that thing to load on the longer machine at all because when you load it on the long arm what's happening is we pin across the top and we pin across the bottom so if I pin this straight and I've got all of this and I pin this straight this is never going to lay flat right it's just gonna do that and that's exactly what happened so the long arm Coulter cannot quote that out there's nothing we can do except put darts and pleats and it's it's not a good thing it's no one is happy with it the tension doesn't you you can't get your attention correct when you're quilting so it makes it a big huge problem this one quote that this gal had brought for me she had six borders on it and I said to her I'm gonna have to give the quote back to you I can't even put it on my machine as she says oh never mind I'm just gonna you know throw it away it doesn't matter and I couldn't bear that and I said let me just take it apart for you I'm just gonna do it for you so I took the borders off I had measured and when I went when I was finished after I'd taken everything off this the have to think about this for a minute the third border was off by six inches the sixth border was off by nine inches that's how big of a difference there was by the time we had measured this side was nine inches bigger just because all she did just she just went around around around around around and sewed them on so do not do this even if you just do one time it's your quilt is not gonna lay flat if somebody hangs it on the wall it's not going to hang straight so what you do so we've measured let's go back to this so we've measured and we have 60 inches on the top 59 inches on the bottom so what we're gonna do let me erase my little goofy borders that I put on here and what we're gonna do is we're going to measure and sew so we're going to measure and if I have 60 inches here I need 60 inches here so what I'm gonna do is when I prepare my borders I go ahead and I take my strips so I think we decided we were going to do four inches right so I have a four inch strip and I'm going to sew that to another four inch strip and so that to another four inch strip and people will ask do you sew straight across or do you sew diagonal I would tell you that I do tend to sew diagonally you know what I mean by that is when you take your two strips and you sew them like this so that when they lay flat you've got that diagonal seam the reason that I do that is because I have less bulk in that seam and the other reason is that it seems to if you've got a printed border it seems to disappear a little bit more but some people will tell you that that's a rule it's not a rule to sign for yourself if you find those diagonal borders are either taking up too much fabric which it will if you have very little fabric left you're gonna take up a whole lot more on a diagonal border than you will a straight border a straight seam diagonal seam straight seam so decide for yourself what works best for you but not a rule so but if I have my borders my strips sewn together so I have these long strip what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I've cut off all of my Salvage of course and I'm going to fold this over right sides together and I'm going to cut my top border and my bottom border at the exact same time so they are identical so I'm gonna fold this over right sides together so let's pretend that that's what I've done here my folds right here here's my edge I'm gonna measure my 60 inches and I'm gonna cut it so I have my two pieces so I might have and of course since I only have a 42 inch length I'm of course I have a couple seams in there but that doesn't matter doesn't make any difference so I know that I have two pieces here that are exactly 60 inches and people will say well why do you pick the bigger number rather than the smaller number and there's a reason for that this 60 inch it's gonna fit perfectly and that 59 I can probably smooth out and eek out an extra inch without any trouble at all I don't have to pull anything I don't have to stretch anything it's amazing that you can find it in there but you absolutely can it's not gonna put any stress on that quilt at all to get this edge sixty inches but if I did fifty nine to get sixty inches into 59 what's going to happen is you're gonna have a little pucker so you don't really want that little pucker in there because the pucker is kind of hard to hide so I always go with the bigger number so I take my sixty inch border I'm gonna lay that down and you pin it you go ahead and you take your pins I'm just gonna grab these for a second you can use pins or you can use binder clips I I like binder clips I use them all the time but sometimes you might need more than what you have and if you have pins I cannot get these open you do want to make sure that you have the longer pins quilting pins are different than sewing pins they tend to be an inch and a quarter or an inch and a half long so that you can go through everything but you have to pin it I tend to be somebody I think I've talked in previous videos that I don't do a lot of pinning I press a lot but pinning I can usually hold it where I need to hold it for borders i pin or Wonder clip 100% of the time always always always and what I do is I put a pin in the end and I put a pin in the other end because it has to end up perfect that's that whole idea is that I cut exactly 60 inches so I want to make sure that it stays six two inches so I pin at one end and the other end and then I fold it and I pin it in the middle and then depending upon how long my border is I might put two more pins or three more pins or one more whatever but I'll put some in the middle I'd do the same thing at the bottom I'm going to take my 60 inch strip I'm going to pin right at one end bring it down and pin it at that other end so that that 59 inch border is going and bottom is going to be 60 inches I'm going to pin it in the center and maybe a couple more pins and again you will be amazed you easily can turn that into 60 inches now the top of my quilt and the bottom of my quilt is exactly the same size now I'm gonna do the same thing with this side now since I've added four inches here this number has already changed so let's just say that this is 79 inches and this is 78 inches you do exactly the same thing I've sewn my borders I'm gonna show a couple more strips on here so I have enough make it as long as I need to obviously it needs to be about what a hundred and sixty inches in length at least to start with so I'm gonna do that fold it over right sides together wrong sides together doesn't matter I just need to cut to it exactly the same time and I'm going to cut two strips that are 79 inches I'm gonna do the exact same thing I'm going to pin the end pin the other end find the center and you it is important that you find the center and in fact I should have said this I find the center before I pin it I take my strip I fold it in half and put a pin in it and then I take my quilt fold my quilt in half and put a pin in it so I'm actually lining up I'm taking my border with my pin in it and I take my my quote with my pin in it and I line those up so I should have been clear about that so I'm gonna do the same thing on this side this is my 79 inch strip I'm going to pin the end pin the other end line up my two pins and pin it in the center and then it's real easy after that to go ahead and put two three four more pins in it whatever you need and again you won't even notice the fact that you have somehow because it sounds horrible to think that you're stretching your quilt but gosh I mean I have we've had some you know horrible incidents where we maybe even had to come up with an inch and a half to be able to make this quilt square and we've not had any trouble with that but this is important with every border you add so after you've added this four inch border let's say now you've decided you got the quilt done and it's so dang cute you do want to put it on your queen-size bed now you found out that you need to add 14 more inches in in borders and so again what will happen is if we have our quilt we have our four inch border you might decide then you're going to do some little pop of color and you're going to do a little two inch border and then you're going to do another four inch border whatever you're going to add you need to decide what you're gonna do but each time each border that you add each color that you add you measure every single time every single time it takes minutes it takes a couple of minutes to take your little long tape measure measure that piece pin it cut it but it is all the difference in the world to make sure that your quilt is flat and the way that you're gonna finish it and even if you know that you're going to tie it or you're going to machine quilted or yourself or stitch in the ditch or whatever you're gonna do you still want this quilt to drape on your bed perfectly you want to fold it up and know that it folds up square so this kind of a thing not attractive we don't like that alright okay so let's see one other thing so this was important oh sorry oh I don't know what happened it was an earthquake let's say that we have a quilt is sixty inches by 70 inches and we have made a bunch of half square triangles that look like this and all of them are 5 inches so if they're all 5 inches and by that five inches finished which is a whole other thing if this is a five and a half inch block when I show it using my quarter inch seam all the way around it's going to finish at five inches right so I've started with five and a half inch blocks it will finish at five inches and that's what is important to know is that it's the finished size so I know that five is the or that sixty is divisible by five and seventy is divisible by five so what I could do is I could put 14 of these five inch blocks on this side I can put 14 on this side is that right seven yeah and I can put 12 on this side and twelve on this side so once I've sewn those together twelve times five I'm sure that's right 12 times 5 is 60 inches 12 times 5 is 60 inches 14 times 5 is 70 and then in the corner I'll just put 1 right because this is 5 inches this is 5 inches so I'll put another one right here another one right there another one right there and another one right there so when you sew this together of course you've got your top row which is actually going to be 14 of them your bottom row which is your 12 your 1 and your 1 same thing up here and you're going to sew this row to here so you can do that if you have a block that you've made you have a whole bunch of leftovers you have some squares you have a charm pack something else that you've used you want to put those squares in there it's an easy way to make sure that it will fit or to find out if it will fit now the other thing that you can do what if it's not divisible you just have to make it divisible so that make sense so let's say that you your quilt is 56 by I don't know 67 I don't think anything is divisible by those two numbers and so what you have to do is you just have to add borders so just like we've talked about coping strips before you put coping strips on your quilt to get it up to the size that you need so again we have these blocks over here that are five and a half inches that are going to finish at five inches so we need to have two numbers that are divisible by five so we need this to be 60 and we need this number to be 70 so all I need to do is I need to end up with two inches so all cut well yeah because I need four inches so I'm going to cut a two and a half inch strip for this side or border and one for this side so if I've added two inches there and two inches there I now have 60 and then the same thing I only need three inches here so I'll have a inch and a half down here and an inch and a half here now that's going to worry people because you're gonna think well I've got two inches inch and a half two inches inch and a half you will not see that your I will absolutely correct that no one will look at that quilt from afar and go oh my gosh what is the craziness with that border no one will see that and in fact at the end I'm going to throw some other pictures in there of some other finished quilts and I'll point out to you the ones that have these odd borders that we added that were coping borders to get up to a size so that we could put whatever pieced border we want because again if we have a quilt that is 56 by 68 but we need it to be 80 by what was our number nine before we have to add a bunch of stuff so we could add a little colorful border here we could add our half square triangles here and even at that so now we're still only at 60 by 70 so we need another 14 inches right to get to our 94 and up here we need another 20 inches to get to our 80 so you just have to keep in mind then that that means I'm going to need another 10 inches on this side another 10 inches on this side and I'm going to need 7 inches at the bottom and 7 inches at the top you can do that however you and however you want to I might do something as simple as putting a 3 inch little side piece on both sides so now I'm dealing with 7 inches of border and depending upon what's on the inside you know again if if I've got some 10-inch blocks in here I would never do one border that was 7 inches you could go ahead and take that same 7 inches and you could do a 2 inch border and then you could do a 3 inch border and then another 2 inch border you might still end up with that 7 inches but there's enough going on that it doesn't look like you just had to add more fabric it really looks like you planned things out and went through a lot of work to add all of those extra borders so again sometimes it's nice to see it visually and to have just to see how that looks and see that it doesn't look weird and so I'm gonna add a bunch of pictures so hopefully this all made sense and hopefully what you'll will do is be able to get your quilt to the size you want it to be oftentimes it doesn't matter we just add a border and I have made so many quilts that they're all over the place they're on the foot of every bed they're in multiple different armoires there on the couch their seasonal it kind of doesn't matter but if you're making a quilt for a bed it's important that it fit that bed properly and again every once in a while whatever you've pieced in the inside it's just not quite big enough to fit that specific bed so it's nice to know how to add color and design add extra borders to be able to get at the size that you want and to put those borders on accurately so that you don't have this weird wonky thing when you're done and your long on quilter will thank you for that so alright well thanks for joining us for our border talk and I hope that was helpful and be sure and check out a lot of these quilt patterns we've put on our website you'll be able to find them there at WWF a brick patch net you

Channel: The Fabric Patch

Views: 60,080

Rating: 4.8989248 out of 5

Keywords: fabricpatch, border, easy, border math, how to, adding borders, series, row sampler, beginner, quilt, quilting, the fabric patch

Id: FZOR5fkk_Nw

Length: 40min 8sec (2408 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020