Binding Tips and Tricks

good morning national quilter circle it's time for take a break tuesday we're going to step back maybe from all those projects we're working on let's have a little bit of a time to sit back look at a topic we're going to be talking about binding today and if you would like to download the outline of what we're doing today it will be in the comment section so you can find the link there i am so glad to join you i knew we took a little break we haven't been together for a while but it's great to be back with you on facebook we are going to take a real step back to the beginning of the year if you remember in january and if you haven't seen that january episode it's in the video tab at national quilter circle we talked about setting goals for the year and so remember i wrote mine down in big sharpie and put them here in my sewing area so that i would remember to work on that skill of pressing cleaning up once a month which i've really been working on but the last one on my list was that project that snowman project that needed to be quilted and it needed binding well it took me a while to find it so i know if you are all honest you probably have some project lurking that might take a little bit of a dig to find but i finally came across the snowman project i won't unveil it all the way but this project got worked on i think maybe a dozen years ago at a quilt retreat and he became a quilt top but he's never been quilted and he's never been bound so now that i have found it now hold me accountable to get it quilted and get the binding on that binding is going to be the issue though because i waited 12 years i don't have binding fabric anymore so it'll be a little bit of an adventure quilt shops are open now and finding a a suitable binding sometimes we put that off to the end of the project hopefully not too far off from the project not 12 years but i'll find a binding and i'll bring it back to and show you that it's finished getting it off of my list for the year so okay let's get into our topic for today binding tips and tricks binding is that very last portion of our quilt that we have a chance to kind of put our stamp on the quilt that we've created some people love it some people hate it that's okay it still is the ending pro portion of our quilt so when we do whether we love it or or not we need to work on getting that outer edge finished because otherwise that quilt can be used it can't be laundered it needs something to cover the outer edge of of our patchwork creating that finished edge and trying to get some kind of a miter on the corner now these turned out fairly well sometimes they don't and what can be done to kind of change that and what how should i cut my binding those are all burning questions that all quilters especially the very beginning on learning these things wonder well where do i go what do i do what is the common thing so we are going to look at binding let me get my supplies out here today binding can be cut in various ways we can cut binding on the bias bias binding yes does last longer if you're creating an heirloom quilt that's going to be used um and you want that outer edge to be really really sturdy but in general most of us cut our binding on with our length width of grain across the fabric so i've got a piece here i tried to pick something where you can see the back and the front that are different so this is the inside of the back side of the fabric most of us will cut our binding with the fabric wof if you've seen that abbreviation and don't recognize it means with the fabric so most of us will cut with the fabric binding and link those together now in that cutting process there's the other thing to determine what width are we going to cut our binding some patterns will have it listed what width that they want you to cut your the binding and the yardage is figured according to that so you'll probably want to follow that unless you have a preference note that before you buy your fabric so that you know for sure that you have enough now when i was beginning the process my instructor used two and a half so two and a half inch wide binding is what i tend to go to toward a two and a quarter inch binding is a little bit smaller in the end a little bit more in the traditional width of a binding but that is a personal thing you can decide an inch and a quarter or an inch and a half with the fabric now i'm going to go ahead and cut these so we have a couple of strips to work with today so i've lined up the ruler with my fold here press my fabric always make sure that you have fabric that's nice and flat doesn't have any wrinkles in it lined up a line on my ruler with the fold i usually tend to cut away from my body with the fold at the closest to me so that i know that i'm kind of pushing the fabric away now i've made a cut for five here knowing that two and a half times two is five because i need two strips so i'd like to cut as many widths under my ruler as possible i could go up to three but today i don't quite need that so i just need five there and then i will cut that in half to two and a half now always remember one two and a half i'm always counting to make sure i'm on the right line so that i have the appropriate width it's the saddest thing in the world to cut a bunch of strips at two and a half and then cut like one at two and a quarter make sure you know which width you're going to count out loud if you need to to remind yourself what width you're actually cutting consistency here okay now once we have the width of fabric the joining of those pieces is important to create a long strip so there are oops a couple of ways we can go about that you can do end to end it's not the end of the world if you're really short on fabric and you can't waste anything in a in a diagonal seam to do end to end you would take the selvages of course away but to do end to end but because of the way this is folded and applied to the quilt you get kind of get a buildup of fabric and a thick spot in the binding so what mostly we end up doing is doing a diagonal seam and i have this fun little two and a half inch square ruler that i tend to keep handy i kind of have denote noted him as my binding tool it's only used for marking lines i use it for other trimming things too but i tend to keep it with the things i when i'm making binding because as i lay the diagonal there's a nice diagonal line across this tool that diagonal at the bottom of my strip i can then go in and make a diagonal line that will be my stitching line for joining pieces of my binding now there's my diagonal line i think you can pick that up i used a friction pen that's dark so that you could pick that up a lot of times i'll use just a really light pencil line because it's on the back side of the fabric and it only needs to be seen by me long enough to get across that some people have no problem stitching that diagonal just by shooting across between the fabrics now i'm going to align these how i'm going i would do it for joining and i have to think about this piece to this piece some people can easily eye going that diagonal from that intersection to this one across without drawing a line but every time i try to do that i tend to get a sag in my line and i want to have this be a nice straight strip when i get done the idea is i stitch there and i fold back and i will have now a continuous strip for my binding now you saw me flip pieces around because we can join them together wrong end up end up having something that looks like this a mitered corner the idea is to create a long straight strip so if the bottom piece is laid this way whoops this way and we've got the diagonal here when i open back we create that continuous strip taking that over to the sewing machine then we're going to join those pieces together if you need to put a pin to help hold them in place one on top of the other do so otherwise if you can easily hold it and slide it under your machine that will work too now if i have my fabrics laid properly and that line is in the right spot i should have all my fabric to the left of the sewing machine that will be the clue sometimes we still will join things together the wrong way and open it and go oh i thought i had it right so don't feel bad if that happens it's a short seam it's easy to take out so that we can join those nicely together and then this little demo i just need a couple of strips to show you what i'm going to be doing so now that i have that stitched across the diagonal i'm going to come in and use my iron and i'm gonna open up that seam now there is a controversy whether you put the seams to one side or you open them it's quilter's choice at this point i open mine up to try and reduce the bulk and then press that flat so let's come in at the iron and press that so that it's not a thick spot then i come in with the scissors you could trim with a rotary cutter but you have to keep flipping pieces away make sure you don't snag the underneath portion scissors works very easily to come in here and trim threads and approximately a quarter inch seam allowance left behind since it's going to be on the inside close counts at this point you don't want to get too close though we don't want to fray but leaving approximately a quarter inch seam there now we have prepared a long piece for binding and in some quilts if you have a quilt that is a queen size or a king size you might be joining eight to up to ten of these strips together so the idea is to have a nice straight piece that doesn't have kind of a wonkiness to it so try to get that as joined as nicely as possible now we're going to prepare the beginning portion of the strip and this is a little trick that i learned watching um i believe it was and i got to think of her name real quick alex anderson i believe this is her little trick for preparing the the beginning portion that you're going to stitch to the quilt now there are all kinds of binding tools on the market there are techniques for joining the two pieces together when you get to the very end there are a lot of different things on the market problem is either i can't find the tool when i need it or i can't remember how to use the tool when i get to it so i found this technique to be pretty foolproof so what i did was i folded to make a 45 degree angle then i'm folding again i'm going to press the rest of my binding here in half so that the right side is on the outside but this is my preparation it's kind of like creating a tunnel that my binding the end of my binding will go into at the very end i'm going to trim away you'll see a diagonal across there where i folded i'm going to trim and leave approximately a quarter inch of fabric that will be the seam allowance on the inside of my tunnel right here i'm going to press the rest of this really quickly now when it comes to the pressing portion here try to align the cut edges one over the top of the other the idea is then that creates a very consistent width of strip for you to use as your binding and you don't want to if it's not quite lined up you may actually miss the edge of the fabric and when you're stitching it on and have a consistency problem there so trying to press this right in half i was pressing some black binding for a project coming up last evening and the lighting as we get older we all know that we need a little bit more lighting it was a little bit rough trying to find the exact fold until this morning i waited until i had better lighting so good lighting is another thing to to think about in your sewing room we all like to add a little bit of of extra light in those work rooms in our studios when we are working on colors that are harder to see the other thing is that when you're working on a solid fabric solid color so the right and wrong side don't seem to be much different maybe it's batiks or solid color fabric now when you go to join those end to end remember or try to keep track of which side you're using as the right side so that all of the seams end up on the inside of your binding and why do i stress this point i have joined them back and forth thinking well it's solid fabric it won't make a difference but if you denote one side as the wrong side and one is the right side you don't want to have seams sometimes on the outside of your binding and some on the inside of your binding so follow follow suit there make sure that you know what your which side of the fabric you're working with now a lot of times what i do when i get this long strip is that i wrap my fat my binding into a little bit of a skein or a loop here so that it's not in a big twisted knot when i try to apply it to my quilt top so i've got this piece ready to go i'm going to lay it by the by the sewing machine next what you need to do is prepare i've got a small quilt sandwich here and we're going to prepare we're going to pretend this is our quilt top and what i need to do is trim now i've marked it it's kind of smudged but if you see there's a line on my batting i'm going to leave about an eighth of an inch of batting beyond my quilt top so that when i get done my binding will actually be filled it won't be hollow inside so as i trim my backing and my batting i'm going to leave just a little bit of that batting to extend beyond my quilt top if anybody has questions today you can add those into the comments let us know where you're watching from let me know what are you close to getting bad binding onto a quilt top or a project that you're working on because once we get to the binding it's the downhill it's great to know that you're finishing up some projects okay now i have this trimmed and ready for binding to apply be applied so i've my backing and my binding or batting are about an eighth of an inch beyond my quilt top here and then i'm going to apply the binding yes the colors are an interesting combination but i needed contrast so you can see what i was doing so i probably wouldn't be putting a red binding on a purple project too often but well if my granddaughters asked maybe i would okay now this is where that little tunnel that you created this is where this comes into play we're going to apply the binding to our quilt top and i should have folded that the other direction let me refold it here so it would be better visibility when you go to make your 45 degree angle it can be folded in either direction but in order for me to show you exactly how to do it and how to lodge that piece the very beginning i need it folded the opposite direction that's how it goes right when you're live okay i'm gonna be trimming it now the tip on doing this alex anderson had the idea of going around and putting in the tunnel i had a viewer when i worked for a quilt magazine put give us a tip about at the beginning normally we would start stitching about here and go toward the corner leaving a tail at the very beginning for the overlap but this viewer talked about starting with one layer so opening the binding up and stitching from the the diagonal here that we have we've created stitching a quarter inch which is what the seam allowance you're going to want to use stitch from here down about three inches and after i tried it i thought how brilliant because this tends to shift a little when we get around to putting things in the tail and by doing that little first stitch it keeps everything in place and i wish i knew their name i would give them credit today but i did not reserve i didn't copy down the name of the person who gave the tip but let's get that first three inches done it was a game changer when i tried doing it this way i was like sometimes people think of the most ingenious things okay so i've got this stitched about three inches here now i'm going to fold fold my binding back and i can begin down just a ways i need that still to be a tunnel and this to be free a bit so about an inch or two down and then i'm going to approach my corner and i'm going to approach that very carefully because when we get to corners this is where we all have issues i think i remember being a new quilter and none of my corners turned out and i was so frustrated i'd put so much time into my quilt top that i was just heartbroken when i couldn't figure out how to get mitered corners so what i'm doing is i'm stitching all the way to within one quarter inch of the quilt top corner so let's see if i were to mark on here so i'm about right here visually we kind of know where a quarter inch is into that so that's what i'm underneath the machine that's where i'm at right now i'm going to take a tack stitch break thread we're going to take it out of the machine i know it's a lot easier if we could just somehow keep going but it doesn't work out quite that way so i have now stopped within a quarter inch underneath of my piece fold up and away from my quilt top and fold back now that's an easy instruction most of us have done that before but when we pull this tight so this makes a perfect corner we tend to get a dimple in the corner of our binding and by being a quilt instructor once told me be a little more sloppy i was like what more sloppy i didn't understand what she meant and that means that instead of pulling that tighter on the corner have it extend just about an eighth of an inch just a little anywhere from maybe you know it's it's around an eighth is what i i guess i can explain and if you try it you'll see what i mean by letting that extend just a little bit it gives us more fabric to make it around the corner okay then i'm putting it back in the machine and i'm starting at that spot visually underneath there where i start i stopped before i'm going to do a tack stitch so i'm about a quarter inch from both corners now i'm going to proceed down this this side of the quilt that little bit of extra batting that we leave behind there does help fill that binding so it's not empty i know when i've i've done just a few competition items and when i've gotten comments back from judges that's the thing that i usually they say they've said at the beginning your binding is hollow it doesn't have any any fabric or any batting inside of it which makes it wear more if it's filled it's kind of rounded and it wears better okay we're going to do another corner just so we remember because we see things once good see two or three times it's when we start to actually start to make it part of our thought processes so pull back leaving just a little extra on the corner and then you can feel the die that fold underneath there so you know where to put your needle in and begin down the next side of your quilt top make sure everything's flat underneath as you put it back in it's easy to accidentally get kind of a as you pull it out of the machine and back in to get something to fold back the wrong direction so we can go back around here now i could do the other two corners for you live but you've seen it twice and you now have it available in video so you can go back and watch that what i need to do is simulate the closure over here so we are going to pretend that we've come down this side and we're going to leave it it's going to be long there are always times when we get around and we're like oh so close we needed just a little bit more and we have to add one more strip or one more piece of of binding but we're going to simulate it here as we approach now i've got this out of the way i've got my tail of that needs to go into that little um space and let me get just within about an inch of where you prepared i want to break thread and take it out so you can see what i'm going to do here i would leave it under the machine at this point and i'm usually working right here but because i can't move my camera and i'm a one person show here i want you to see what i'm doing okay underneath there is my little my little tunnel right i need to cut this so it fits inside of that so i fold back i can kind of see where my fold is there i need it to be longer than that and what i usually do is i'm eyeing it i'm over the top seeing the angle underneath so i know i'm long it's always better to cut a little and leave it long and you can always take more off but you can't put it back on so i'm good there okay i can now trim the other side because what i want to do is create a diagonal and once you do one of these you'll be thinking okay that piece underneath there needs to be shorter the one on top needs to be longer it's going to fit inside of my little tunnel it's going to lay down there okay we've got a couple questions someone's making a t-shirt quilt should i use a t-shirt binding i probably would not t-shirt fabric is so soft and stretchy that it would give you just one more headache i'm afraid i would just use a cotton binding for that um why leave extra batting oh and we're gonna i'm gonna show you in just a minute when i roll this over and show you some hand stitching um let's see how to start the binding at the very beginning you know that's what's really great is that this video lives in the videos tab at national quilter circle and you can go back and watch it again and you can actually stop it so that you can even manipulate your own binding right along with me so um because i'm limited on time i can't go back to the very beginning now but um let's see what else cut tie before you cut your backing and binding oh i'm pretending this is a quilt top my fabric at the top here i'm pretending that's a quilt top a quilt top usually has you know your quarter inch seam on the outer edge you've gotten it everything pieced together and you're ready to layer it so that means the batting and the backing are always larger okay now that i've tucked my piece in to the little tunnel and i've overlapped my stitching just a bit i can now cut thread and take it out okay and we're going to cut this because he was a simulation so he's not in the way and trim some threads we always have corners where we break thread and take it out of the machine now to get the idea of why we leave extra batting when i start to roll this over toward the back and i've rolled that fold to line up with my stitching line now my binding will have batting in it and will be filled and it'll be the same thickness as my quilt top so that's why we leave that extra little piece of batting that extends so that it fills the batting as it's rolled over now the other portion that i wanted to really quickly go over because we were talking about this overlap method is that it's tucked and it's not stitched and some people will say but i want it stitched well you're going to stitch well most of us not everyone will be stitching by hand on the back side of our quilt top so i figure why not stitch this by hand also i can do some small stitches in that diagonal there's my overlap right there one inside the other so i can go in and lodge my thread take those stitches to hide be hidden stitched right along the edge there and keep going until i'm to the other side and close the other side also let's see if there's any other questions while i'm stitching this that i can talk to you about can you use flannel for binding yes you can i would always opt for the two and a half inch wide binding if i'm using flannel just because with the two and a quarter it's very narrow it's a narrower binding and with the thickness of flannel i would opt for the little bit wider makes it a little easier to get around the corner and you can probably trim that batting a little closer just a little tiny bit of it in there and of course my thread needle came unthreaded so here's a little tool that i have enjoyed having because i like to use very fine needles for binding it is the clover needle threader and it works amazing made by clover a little needle threader that works on the really small fine needles because they're very hard to thread the eye is very small but it makes a very very small hole in your fabric when you're doing binding so it's very easy to manipulate and do that so i'm closing that diagonal by hand probably not my best stitching but as i flip that to the other side i can drop my needle because i'm now on at the edge where the binding meets the quilt top i can drop my needle to the back side and i am ready to stitch my binding on the back side so i don't even have to make a knot at that point now the last thing that i wanted to address was the binding at that corner remember that sloppy corner we're going to go a little long today but i think we can get away with this is i want to move over to a corner and show you the fold and how well it turns out by being just a little extra sloppy on the corner of leaving a little fabric to get around now what i tend to do is go in and find just the batting in the backing and i trim the corner because we have a lot of fold and fabric on the corner so i trim that away diagonally and i also like to use it's a tool kind of day today i love to use the little wonder clips to hold my my binding in place for years i held it just by by hand as i get older the wonder clips are wonderful so that i can turn this to the fold right to my stitching line and i'm going to fold one side in and then the other to make a nice little miter on the corner and then as i would hand stitch i would come in and stitch this side then i go into that miter with a couple stitches poke through to the front stitch a couple there poke back through work my way up the next side and see how nicely that corner is going to come in to be a perfect miter because we were just a little sloppy as we applied the binding so that is our trip our ticks our tips and tricks for binding today thanks for joining me and i really enjoy all of your comments um i will get to the rest of them after the show i'll drop in and say hello thanks for joining me today

Channel: National Quilters Circle

Views: 1,432

Rating: 4.9055119 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, quilting tips, quilt, quilt tips, sew, sew quilts, sewing, quilt patterns, quilt projects, quilting projects, quilting patterns, national quilters circle, nqc, quilter, quilting videos, quilt videos, quilting how to, stitching, learn to quilt, quilting class, quilt class

Id: MfH7euBRKl8

Length: 31min 51sec (1911 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021