Chunky Binding Tutorial

[Music] hi it's latifah with latifah cepheir studios thanks so much for joining me today today i get to talk to you about and teach you how to put on a chunky binding it's actually a little bit more than just a chunky binding it's actually making the decision on what size binding you're going to put on your quilt and then i'll give you a really easy formula for you to figure out how wide to cut those binding strips and then from there we'll go to the machine and i'll show you how to stitch that binding down this particular technique is going to work no matter how you finish your binding so if you stitch it to the back flip it to the front and then machine stitch it down that's what we're going to do today then it works if you stitch it to the back flip it to the front and then hand stitch it down maybe with a big stitch just like a big stitch with visib with visible stitches then it works for that as well or if you prefer to stitch it to the front flip it to the back and then either hand or machine finish it then it works for that as well so i'm really kind of excited about doing this i tried to shoot this video with a finished quilt and everything that wanted to go wrong went wrong so i set that project aside i grabbed this really pretty melody miller just a piece of fabric i quilted it up with a diagonal cross hatch something really simple with some carolyn friedlander on the back and i grabbed a really fun contrast and a pink um kona i'm actually not sure the shape this is for arcona but you know there's a ton of um of shades of kona cotton so i'm kind of excited to put that together it's a little bit less stress than working on a real quilt but you'll get to learn the technique all the same one thing i want to encourage you as you watch this video and after the video when you start to work with your real quilt projects is to start to think about binding as a design choice i think about my binding when i'm pulling my fabric when i'm deciding on a pattern i think about what is going to really frame that quilt well because your binding is this really key visual element in your quilt it's kind of like the icing on the cake it's the finishing touch that we put on our quilts and it's not fair to our quilts to put on the same kind of binding over and over and over again kind of by default when there are so many options for putting on binding in the world my favorite is a one inch binding so that's what i'm going to show you today you can see it on the quilt behind me this is another callaloo quilt that that i just happen to have laying around and you can see that big chunky one inch binding all the way around see how great it frames it right it looks really really fabulous and it really pulls out the other elements in the quilt but you can put like i said pick any size so you could put on a half inch mining or three quarter inch binding or inch and a half binding i think the biggest i've played with so far is two inches which is huge and sort of ridiculous but look who we're talking about here so but um i'm gonna i'm gonna demo on a one inch we're gonna head over to the cutting table and i'm gonna start to show you all the things so that you can take this technique and use it on your own quilts let's head to the cutting table for factors okay so the formula for calculating how wide to cut those strips is this it's four times however wide you're finished with your binding needs to be plus three quarters of an inch so if i want one inch finished with binding four times one equals four plus three quarters of an inch so four and three quarter inch is this width of the strip that i cut out the same thing if i want say a three-quarter inch binding three-quarter inch we know that equals 0.75 we type that in our calculator 0.75 times 4 equals 3 plus three quarters of an inch so three and three quarter inch is how white we would cut that and that works for any size now i'm going to give you that's your basic formula sometimes you may have to cut out a little piece of a strip press it and maybe stitch it with a basting stitch to your quilt flip it and make sure it's right quilts um our fabric is such a there's lots of inconsistencies in fabric there's lots of different lofts in your batting there's so many different variables so because of that um if you're gonna do something like machine stitch the final stitch of your binding now like we're gonna do today oftentimes i'm gonna add like a quarter of an inch to that measurement so i've already tested mines and i'm actually going to add a quarter inch because i know i want to machine stitch it down and i want that machine stitching to fall in my backing which i'll show you at my com at the sewing machine so i'm going to cut these strips five inches wide so four times one inch finished with um plus three quarters of an inch should be four and three quarters and just to give ourselves a little bit of wiggle room i'm going to cut add another quarter inch and cut these strips five inches okay so if i want to cut this on the bias which i do because i like a biased strip a lot of people think that bias is more difficult it really isn't this is probably about let's see two thirds of a yard of fabric or a little bit more and the first thing you want to do is fold a selvage side to a cut side and i do not trim my selvages at this point until after my strips are sewn together so i don't know if you can see that or not but that's actually a selvage there and then that's a cut side so i fold one of them to another and it's going to give you sort of this triangular sort of a shape here and these weird angles okay that's how i started off now this is way too wide for my cutting mat so i'm going to fold along that bias fold okay so i'm just going to fold along that fold so that i can go ahead and start to cut my strips and first thing that we do let's grab our our long ruler and we're just going to trim a nice clean edge let me scoot that over so you can see it a nice clean edge on the side uh we're basically cutting that fold off there all the way across and now i'm just going to come back and cut five inch strips for this particular project just like that now we don't worry about selvage we don't worry about angles on the ends of our fabric we're just going to cut those five inch strips across now if i were cutting i'm straight of grain strips i would just use the fabric that was already off of the boat and just cut a couple of five inch strips across the width of that now if you have something like a stripology ruler or one of the june taylor shaped cup plus rulers or something like that then it's not a bad thing to use when cutting your strips out okay so now what we're going to do is we're going to take all of our strips over to the sewing machine and i'm going to show you how to join your strips at the sewing machine and we're basically just going to take this whole pile of strips that we just cut up and we're going to join them together to make one long piece of binding i'm going to show you how i do that at the sewing machine let's head over there now okay so now that my my sewing machine and it's time to join our strips so i literally will bring my power strips to my machine just like that not a lot of fanfare i do want to remind you that we just cut those strips out we don't care [Music] that we have salvages we don't care what angles or even that this is a straight cut at one end or if one angle is in one direction and one angle's in another direction i'm going to show you how we work around all of that and we trim it off pretty quickly after that so i have my machine set with my needle in the center needle position and i have my a fit on you can also use like an open toe fit or something i do like the janome a fit which is sort of a standard fit because they have this little red dot right in the middle i don't know if you can see that or not and it's like a little red arrow and it shows you where the center or center needle position is so it's actually pretty convenient um so i do like to have the a fit on when i'm doing this and this the way that we do this without measuring or marking is we grab our trusty blue tape so um i love all of the things that we can buy from the hardware store for our sewing room and blue tape is one so now i'm just going to tear off a generous piece i'm going to place this with the right edge of that tape aligned with our needle position on the bed of our machine just like that all the way down okay so in this particular tech when i'm joining these strips especially the really big ones i like to have either an extension table on my machine if you have one it's nice to put on or in this case i have my machine inside of a table which is really not a really nice conveyance to have so and then i'm going to actually move my pot my big polish strips i'm just going to grab the first two and then we're going to talk through how we start to sew those together and the tape thankfully is what we use um to line everything up so the first strip i put on first i placed them at a 90 degree angle so the first strip we're looking at the pretty side of our fabric so of course i selected a kona cotton so you can't tell the right and wrong sides but we're looking at the pretty side the right side of our fabric on the first strip and then we place some right sides together so the second strip would be the we would be looking at the wrong side of our fabric now we want like a nice 90 degree angle here at the bottom if you choose to and i'll show you in a minute when we'll do that you can put a pin or two in just to hold it in place i don't usually do this now these angles happen to be going in the right direction a lot of times they will not so let's say since this is a kona if this were the right right side of the fabric we would place these right sides together i'll show you the two things that we look at to make sure that once we stitch this together that it's going to flip open and we're going to have one continuous strip and we stitch from upper left to lower right every single time upper left to lower right now the upper space here we should have a little bit of a sort of a backwards l here and a backwards upside down l here at the bottom as well those are the two things that we look at we don't care about any of these angles or sites or whatever so if you have to shift that fabric to make sure you have that little l there and at least one on the opposite side then you know you once you stitch it together and flip it open it's going to be in the right placement so and i just make sure it's kind of a 90 degree angle there i don't get super caught up on you can eyeball it and get it pretty good if i'm going to put a pen or two in i just put one here and here just to hold it in place i'm gonna pull those out before i start to sew now the way that i line it up nicely is i put my needle down no i have the machine set center needle position just a standard foot on and standard stitch length which on the janome is about a 2.4 i think that equals about 10 or 11 stitches per inch so put our needle in the down position we snuggle that upper left v right up against the needle the opposite end let me zoom this out just a little bit so you can see the opposite end pretty easily the opposite end we're going to line up with the edge of that tape that we placed that way we know that we're sewing it in a straight line so a few stitches i'm going to take that pin out so that we don't have to run over it and i don't look at my needle i look at making sure that v that sort of upside down v here now the point of it is lined up with that piece of tape so we're just going to sew now of course i'm using a lot of language here and talking you through it but i can throw these on my machine and sew them pretty quickly so we take that off our machine we open it up and we have a continuous strip and we keep adding to that so make sure it's still right side up we grab our next strip we place that right sides together and see these both have salvages on them so we just want to make sure we're sewing past the selvages so 90 degree here we want to upper left lower right needle down snuggle the v put our foot down right on that v align this edge upper left lower right is the way you sew now if something happens and you start to lay things on your machine and you are not sure if once you sew it together it's going to stitch in the right direction what do you do i usually i if i have a small ruler by my machine in this case i'm just going to grab my scissors sort of lay them on the place that i think i'm going to sew and flip it up and if it's a continuous line then i know that it will stitch correctly upper left lower right put our needle down rotate it snuggle the v right on a needle so we know it's going to start right in the correct spot and so i'm lining this edge up with the tape that's where my eye is right there and we do this all the way to the end okay now we have our strip completely sewn together now we have to trim these ends then i do this either a lot of times i grab my big pair of scissors and my big i think that's the eight inch kai um scissors but i grab my kai's at my machine and i trim them at my machine if i have a cutting mat set up in my rotary cutter i will do it with my rotary cutter one thing i do not do is measure this as i trim it so i'm going to show you the way that i cut this so that when we press it we won't have dog ears no matter how we press so that's her strip right there that's our seam along that diagonal we're going to cut up across about a quarter of an inch from a diagonal this is not required getting a tape measure out and then across the top just like that so let me try to let you look at that a little bit closer we cut up across and across along the edge of this piece of fabric and that piece of fabric and then along the diagonal an approximate quarter inch when we open it up it's a nice continuous strip and the nice thing about this and this is how i um trim when i'm doing binding strip or bias tape strips even when i do um bias tape applique and that type of thing no matter if we press to the right or the left or press it open then we're not going to have dog ears okay now we have our strips sewn together now we're going to finish prepping our binding and that's basically um pressing our seams and also then folding our binding in half and pressing it so this step is pretty easy i'm gonna have my nice little aliso mini iron here which is nice because it also has steam now the way that i showed you how to cut those seams we can either press it open which i do like to do on my bindings or you can press it to one side and it doesn't matter which side you press it to and you should not have any dog ears which is really nice i'm going to fold this in half oh picked up some strings there we're just going to fold this in half matching the edges and then create a nice sharp crease on the side of our our quilt here i mean our binding strip here okay just folding it in half matching the two edges and press it go all the way okay i wanted to talk through this step just a little bit because and that's the squaring your quilt up step the reason why is because with the chunky binding you want to be a little bit concerned about quilt designs that come all the way close to the edge of your quilt so a lot of your quilt blocks are going to you're going to have key elements of those blocks that are literally be a quarter inch from the edge of your quilt top and of course this is kind of a whole cloth just a piece of fabric that's quilted um so i can demo putting on the chunky binding if you in fact have a some quilt elements that literally go to a quarter inch within the edge of your your quilt top then you may want to actually extend your squaring up into the batting and backing so you do want to make sure there's a back batting backing on the back that extends all the way to the edge that you cut i would handle that if i had design elements the other thing that you can do that will help prevent you not having to do this is to actually add a skinny or maybe even a larger border all the way around your quilt top a lot of times i don't want to do that so let me show you really quick i'm going to grab that halloween quilt one more time and you're going to see and one of the reasons why especially with my glam clam quilts why i have those really big peripheral shapes is because i don't want that binding to chop off the side of my clam shells i want my binding sort of to kiss the edge of those clam shells all the way around so i built that buffer actually into the shapes so that i can accommodate that chunky binding which you all know that i love so that's just sort of an example if for instance i didn't have that built into these sort of peripheral shapes i would do the same thing i'm telling you here if it's a an inch binding that i'm putting on subtract a quarter of an inch and then lay that three quarter inch line on the outside edge of your quilt top and you're going to include that binding you need that quarter inch in order to be able to stitch your binding on and actually capture the front of your quilt so just a little bitty quick tip because it's not necessary for this particular little guy here i'm just going to take a quick minute and i'm gonna square it up um just normally along the edge of that project and then we're gonna head to the sewing machine and stitch all of this down i'll see you over at the machine now we are ready to stitch our binding down at least we're going to stitch it to um to the back side and then we're going to flip it and then stitch it to the front so we're going to stitch the first side down but let's make a few changes to our machine first the first change we're going to do is to pull the tape up that we use to join our strips and toss that and then the second thing we're going to do is take that regular foot off and if you at all have it i want you to find your quarter inch foot with the flange and put that on your machine the i find that the quarter inch fit with the flange is the perfect foot for this because you do not have to think about lining up the binding which is what we're going to use this foot for with the edge of a regular foot if you don't have it then set your machine up the way you normally would for quarter inch seam allowance and then use that but this is definitely ideal this particular machine i'm moving my needle all the way over so that i can use that quarter inch foot and setting so the second thing we're going to do we're going to use more tape and i'm going to pull pull off actually we're going to put two pieces of tape on down and then you can use if you know the distance from your needle let's just put our needle down really quick and then we're just going to measure one inch from the needle position to the right and just put a piece of tape on the bed of our machine and i'm using the left oh i move my ruler just a little bit i'm using the left edge of that tape and i see where it lines up so i'm going to go ahead and move that and put the tape down just like that okay so that's one inch from the needle so put your quarter inch foot on set your needle to the correct place for your quarter inch settings whatever that is for your machine and then measure an inch from the needle put a piece of tape down grab a second sort of shorter piece of tape and then we're going to measure an inch from the needle in that direction and i don't always do this step but it is a nice step to do because you don't have to guess when you're an inch away from the edge of your quilt and when you're supposed to stop so that's not a bat a bat want to do so inch from your needle to the right and an inch from your needle in the front is where you put the blue tape okay we are ready to sew so i generally start stitching my binding like at the bottom this quilt doesn't have an obvious side to it so i'm just going to start on one of the sides you want to leave at least a 12 inch opening but even a larger opening is better than that so i'm going to leave an extra long tail and start relatively close to the end so what i'm doing is i'm placing my binding under my quarter inch foot line the binding up with the edge of the quarter inch foot and line the edge of the quilt up with the left edge of that that blue tape and what that's going to do is stitch our binding down with a quarter inch seam an inch from the edge so then when we flip it over we'll have one inch of bias tape and you know what i'm not setting this up correctly there you go always what did they say measure twice and cut once well look at it twice and then sew after that because we are going to stitch to the back and then flip it to the front and i'll show you why i do that and why i like it and when i'm doing a machine stitch same setup the edge of the quilt on the blue tape the the so this is uh also it's a good time to show this is the folded edge here and the edge that i'm putting against that quarter inch foot is uh the the raw edge of the fabric where it has the two layers okay now i think we're at the right place and now we can sew okay so um i have a quarter inch seam i do like to put a little lock stitch when i start off moment binding and also when i end before i do my join it's not 100 necessary or you can do a little back stitch if your machine has that so a little lock stitch then i'm kind of lining this up here and i'm going to sew and i take my time with it because i want it to stay nice and lined up so you take your time and make adjustments as you're stitching this along now that quarter inch foot if i don't use it then i find that this method isn't nearly as accurate so if you have it take the time to pull it out now we're going to stop sewing when the front edge of this quilt or the the bottom edge i guess in this with this perspective no matter which side that you're on um aligns with the top edge of the tape that's going in the horizontal direction so you'll see when i stop so i slow down as i'm getting to this end and that's about right right there let's do one more stitch okay maybe a little bit too far and then i you can do a lock stitch here or you can cut your just cut your thread because we're actually going to stitch over that when we come back in the opposite direction okay so now i'm going to show you how to miter that corner um to have really nice pretty mitered corners so now we stopped sewing an inch from the end of that quilt sandwich and we're going to fold it back at a 45 degree angle just like that so that bias well i'm saying bias tape it could be straight of grain your binding tape should extend in that direction for now then we're going to fold it back in this direction right at the edge of the quilt just like that now this is where you can throw a straight pin in if that is helpful to you just to hold it in place while we rotate it now when we rotate it we're going to do a couple of checks just to make sure that everything is lined up properly and we may have to shift it just a little bit now it looks like that bias tape isn't let me take this pin out that bias tape isn't quite coming over to our quarter inch foot when we line the edge of the quilt up with our tape here so let's fold it one more time we're just going to fold it not quite as far back and then come down once again and then let's line it up get everything nice and straight under there just like that when we start to sew this we're actually going to start to sew all the way from the edge of the quilt so start slowly make sure everything is lined up nicely and we should have a really nice mitered corner there perfect so i just measured [Music] lay it out you know maybe six inches at a time now i'm eyeballing this um i've known someone who actually came in and marked three quarter inches from the edge of your quilt that's a little bit much to me if i needed to do that then i would actually just grab a ruler at my machine like that if you know me i don't actually do that either once i get a pretty good idea for how that looks visually that quarter three quarter inches from the edge which is what that measures out to be then [Music] and what i'm looking at is i'm constantly keeping the edge of the quilt along the tape here and making sure that the bias tape is butted up right up against the um the foot there now if you get off just a little bit like i just did i'm just going to cut rip just a few stitches just like that put it back on my machine back where i know i was in the right place line it up make sure my binding tape is nice and straight and stitch right back over it it's pretty easy to get right back on track with that [Music] [Music] okay so we are at our last mitered corner here we're gonna fold that back on the 45 degree angle the other way that you can do this if you are not if you're having problems turning that corner is when you fold it back to make sure this edge here so this bottom edge here is three quarters of an inch from the edge now i'm saying three quarters inch because we're putting on a one inch finish with binding so it's whatever your um your measurement your binding measurement is minus a quarter of an inch if you're if you're doing three quarter inch wide binding then you would subtract a quarter of an inch it'll be half an inch from the end so but in this case we're one inch with binding and we make our adjustments here before we fold the binding back in that direction just like that now when we rotate it to start to stitch that last side down it should fit perfectly and it does so we start sewing right from the end now i want to give myself quite a bit of room to be able to join so i'm only going to stitch here maybe three or four inches and then i'm going to lock my stitch and take it off my machine so that i can show you how i do i join okay uh i guess that's enough we'll lock our stitch cut our thread and take it off of our machine okay now we have these two pretty generous ends and the first thing i do so i gave myself it looks like it's about maybe 14 inches between those two points okay give yourself as much room as you can because it really helps when you start to you'll see we have to really kind of manipulate the fabric to make it work so i lay the left side down and maybe about eight inches in i'm gonna take a pair of scissors i do all this at my machine so and i'm just gonna cut the binding so i have about an eight inch tail here now okay now i lay that down nice and flat and i lay this the other tail from the opposite end right on top of it now how do i know how much to cut this piece on top that piece that we just cut off and if you don't have a long enough piece that we have an extra long piece here we could have cut a piece off here as well the width of your binding strip is how much that you should overlap those two pieces right so a lot of times i'm just laying it on top where i can see the bottom piece which we've already trimmed and now we're gonna from that edge we're gonna cut the top piece of binding tape the same amount of overlap as the width of our binding strip so just like that so if we look at it i'm going to spread it a little bit here it's kind of hard to see when it's overlapped but the overlap is the width of the binding okay so that's how we we um we cut that now the next step is we're going to do that diagonal join again so i like to go ahead and we don't need this tape really too much anymore we're gonna we definitely don't need that piece this piece here we can leave that on the machine but i am going to grab the last piece of of tape and because when we do this joint we're really going to be manipulating a lot i'm going to throw my a foot back on put it back in the center needle position just to make that join easy for us i've done it before while i left my quarter inch foot on and tried to work with it because i was being lazy it really doesn't work as well so take the few extra seconds to set it up so that you make everything easier for yourself so once again the right edge of that tape is aligned with our needle just like when we joined our strips earlier now i um this is where i wish i had selected a print fabric where you can see the wrong and right side so it'll be a little bit more difficult for you to see these strips here because our lovely kona is the same pretty much on the right and wrong sides so so this is the part where it can get confused and turned around and turned upside down and and actually get things sort of messed up just a little bit but we want to do a diagonal join just like we did on all the rest of our binding strips here so i'm going to show you an easy way to do that okay so we're going to open up the bottom piece so the piece coming off of the left side so we can see the pretty side of that fabric this is where i think i should have used the fabric that has two sides to it instead of a kona but we're looking at the pretty side we'd open up the right side as well so we're seeing the pretty side as well so they're both in the right direction now we're going to sew these two together at a diagonal so this is my little trick here to make sure they're both turned in the right direction the top piece i lift it up this bottom left corner i'm going to fold it up so that it touches the right side then i'm going to place these place it on top of the left strip then i can open it up and pin it together now remember we're going to do that diagonal join so we want a little bit of overlap here at the top with an upper left v just like that i'm going to put a pin through it i'm going to put that pin in a diagonal so that i can fold it back and double check it again and then manipulating that quilt you always have to manipulate a lot at this time especially if you're working on a smaller project and you just don't have a lot of room to have that overlap and i'm gonna put another pin the so upper left lower right we're still piecing it the same way that we did our joins just like that now we can double check that it's going to um if we pin it in those two places we can double check that let's put one pin in the middle too because this is a pretty big well not really the middle but kind of halfway through okay so if we open that up we can make sure that it's going to piece in the right direction you see how that works okay so do you want me to go over that again let's go over that one more time how i did that you could also rewind this when when you get to this stage so the left piece is folded still that goes on the bottom the right piece on the top at the overlap is the same width as your binding so you use your little bit of extra binding strip to double check that okay we open the bottom piece pretty side up we open the top piece also pretty side up now on the top piece which is the right side we look at the bottom left corner we just fold it up so that the this edge matches the top just like that what we're doing is we're folding that at a 45 degree angle just like that now we're going to place that on top of the left strip and that just lines it up perfectly but we have to flip it open and pin it in place so that we can sew along that diagonal we overlap just the teensiest bit so we have a little bitty tiny v up at the top upper left lower right remember and then the same thing we make sure it's overlapped just the teensiest but we may have to scoot the one at the top over just the teensiest bit so we have the little v at the lower left as well just putting some pins through it to make sure that it sort of all stays in place because it's really a tight corner it always is so it's always you just take your time with this step and your join now i'm gonna move all of the quilt top out of the way i'm going to manipulate everything so i have my binding strips that are going to fit right under my machine just like that i put my needle in the down position i snuggle the upper left v right up against the needle just like we join our binding strips now i normally will take just a stitch or two just to make sure it's going to hold that end now i'm going to manipulate my quilt and my binding make sure everything is nice and flat in front of my needle oh so right now this will be all kind of a big jumbo bunch or whatever i want to make sure this part is nice and flat now if you get to this point and you are oh you are a little bit confused and you want to make sure your stitching get in the right place you could stitch it with a basting stitch open it up make sure it lays correctly and then um and then open it and then take it back to your machine and put a proper stitch in it but i think we're pretty confident right now so now we're just aligning that v with the right edge of that tape again so right to that straight pan and then take it out and then sew straight to the end all right so let's see if it worked it's perfect okay so now we just want to trim that extra fabric and have a nice seam allowance here and we're just trimming a quarter of an inch from that seam that we just sew make sure you're cutting on the right side of the seam you don't want to cut all your work off and that gets discarded and open it up again and at this point sometimes the faux the foam lines up pretty nicely here but sometime it doesn't if you're off sewing just a little bit so a lot of times what i'm going to do is take that to my ironing board and give it a really nice press i am going to go ahead and this part isn't quite as necessary but i like to just you know we've put so much time into everything else we're going to go ahead and set this back up for a night a quarter inch seam allowance we still have our one inch tape marker on the bed of our machine and we're just going to go ahead and stitch this last section down i stitch over the last few stitches by you know maybe about a half of an inch or so just to make sure they're nice and secured and continuous um if we did this correctly then it should fit nice and snugly it shouldn't be any excess fabric here so you make sure it's nice and extended all the way down and i did not take this and press it normally i would but i'm going to go ahead and stitch it down we're going to be overly confident here which is not always a good state to be in when you're sewing stitching it i mean pressing it would make it a lot smoother probably make sure it's nice and flat and it'll also allow you to press that new seam a nice crisp flat seam and then that or last join i mean now we're just stitching it in place uh all right let's take it off of our machine okay we have one last step to do okay look at that it looks so good okay so now in this case i'm gonna pull my binding to the front and we're gonna stitch it down now i'm going to show you right here why i added that extra quarter inch so first of all let's check our minor corners if we flip that fabric up let's look at the back oh look at that beautiful mitered corner and then flip it to the front we can also miter those corners beautiful look how beautiful that is that's gorgeous okay so the next thing that i'm going to do i'm going to actually do this off i'll show you a few of them here and then i'll take it off camera and do the rest and then come back and show you how to stitch this in place and i'm only doing this step because it's it's pretty quick to do on the machine i like to finish quilts this we're basically going to do a top stitch really close to the edge of that but because we gave that little extra quarter inch or so we can make sure that that stitch falls into the backing and not on our binding on the back of our project which i absolutely love so i'm going to take this to my ironing board and from the side that we stitched the binding down on i'm actually going to take it and press it all the way around in that direction so that it's nice and flat then after it's pressed i'm going to wrap it to the front of our quilt remember we stitched it to the back and we're wrapping it to the front to stitch it in place and then i'm i'm going to i think i'm going to go grab my bigger clover wonder clips but i'm going to go around the whole perimeter make sure the binding is nice and snug to the edge of that quilt sandwich and i can feel whether or not it overlaps the seam enough to where that stitch will fall in the background and not on my binding and i'm going to go ahead and do that so give me one second i'm going to press so this is nice and flat on the back wrap it to the front and put my clover wonder clips all around just to hold it in place so i can come back and sew it up in my machine i'll be right back okay i'm back okay so whoever let me forget about the almighty elmer's or just a washable school glue then we may no longer be friends actually i forgot about it for just a quick second um so sometimes i do just throw my the bic jumbo wonder clips on and they work just fine but the beauty about using that school glue is that it's just a really light application and then pressing it in place which i've done all the way around my quote except for this little section here then you don't have to worry about taking clips off you know that it's in the exact right location and it's really really really effective and efficient there's lots of wonderful uses for school glue this doesn't have a special tip on it my friends at purple daisies quilt i'll have to i'll put the correct website at the bottom of the um the video but it's christy fincher and her amazing mom sharon chamber they have these wonderful really fine tips that you can just screw onto your elmer's school glue or any high school glue bottles and they give you a really fine application of glue and it's great for if you want to glue your curves or other things i just put a really small application um and i'll show you quickly how i do that so once again i did take this to my ironing board first i pressed the back so make sure it's fully extended and press it nice and flat on the back then i pull it to the front and make sure it's hugging that curve that edge of the quilt top really snuggly and then i i think you can see this on the camera but i'm literally just putting a pretty light uh it would help if it's open a pretty light application of glue just inside of the seam line for the stitch that we where we stitched the binding on to the front like that and then i'm going to sew this part last and hopefully give it a chance to sort of dry a little bit but for all of the rest the whole perimeter of the the rest of the quilt then i um actually ran a light iron over it to sort of dry the glue and secure it nicely so i'm just going to press this in place it should be okay i may throw a wonder clipper tube back on just to make sure it stays in place until i get around to it but normally you put the glue on just like that run a quick iron over it and it is good to go and just throw these in just in case but you'll see how easy it is without the glue now this is all sort of bonus um like i said once you get the the um bias binding um stitched down on the first side then you can finish this however you want so if you want to do a like a ladder stitch or the other stitch that a lot of people use for bindings where you kind of take a bite out of the binding and go into the back the backing or whatever you can do that i think that this would be really lovely with that big stitch straight on top all the way around which is a fun way to finish a binding especially since i did the flip to the front version um so by all means finish this however um however you know like whatever way makes you happy okay now in this particular situation you have several different options as far as feet are concerned what we're essentially going to do to top stitch this down is we're going to sew kind of edge stitch really close to the edge one foot that's great for edge stitching and just about everybody has is your zipper foot there is a zipper foot attachment to the small accu feet the narrow accu feed which i don't have right now which would be wonderful because it still has that walking foot sort of capability in it that would be wonderful the standard zipper foot if you have a straight stitch only machine then a lot of times when i'm doing a top stitch i'm lining one that side of the fabric up with one inside edge and then the needle will fall just to the right of that or to the left depending upon which edge you select so you could do that if you're pretty good at topstitching you can probably use just about any foot a walking foot of some sort is really nice so in this particular case i'm using it's the sd little foot attachment let me pull it off really quick that goes on the standard accu feed and accu feet for the janome and it's it's really a ditch quilting foot but i'm going to use that latch to ride right against the side of that binding and then i'm going to move my needle over so that it falls just inside of that so let's see how it works out i've actually never used this particular foot on it but i know it it should work pretty effortlessly with that so and then when you're top stitching this binding let's stick this in place and let's move my needle over when you're top stitching that binding you really want to take your time with it so this is not your pedal to the metal activity and if you're like me you may need to slow it down here because if you have a heavy foot then you know you want to work with yourself kind of okay so i think let me see if my needle is moved over let me move it over just a few more notches and see how happy i am with it i think that's good right there let's see how this works uh oh i kind of want to look at it oh how gorgeous is that and it is falling in my backing fabric oh i'm excited okay so i'm just taking my time with it i have that that ditch um it's a ditch quilting foot so that that little ledge in the middle is literally resting right along the edge of the the binding there and i move my needle over so that it falls just to the right of that so it's like catching it but it's really close to the edge and it's creating a beautiful stitch there and you can speed up a little bit once you get a little bit more confident about how you handle whatever foot you choose to use for that edge stitching now you see how nice that is with the glue down it's in place i don't have to manipulate the fabric any i just stitch because i know it's glued in the right place already now i did put a little i did put glue on the corners but it's a little bit more bulk so i did go ahead and put a wonder clip there but i'm going to hold this in place and stitch all the way to the corner before i turn just to make sure everything stays in place okay i think we're right there in the corner and it looks perfect i'm so excited about this okay so take your time with it okay so let's look at our stitches look how beautiful that is that's gorgeous and it's nice when that stitch falls into the backing so then you have a really gorgeous binding and it looks really really nice on the front as well so i'm going to go ahead and stitch this all the way around i may have to take it off to iron that glass bit of glue basting down but i think this is going to be it [Music] look at that beautiful beautiful beautiful stitch mitered corners perfectly mitered on the front and the back and you can barely even see that stitch on the front look how gorgeous it is and just like that we have our chunky binding on i hope you learned a lot today at the end we threw in a little bonus with glue basting we talked about top stitching or our binding to the front of our quilt with that really close to the edge top stitch and overall i really hope that you learned to accept this concept that binding is definitely a design choice and that you have a lot more options than you ever thought possible thanks so much for joining me today thanks for watching send pictures i love to see your work and we'll talk soon you

Channel: Latifah Saafir Studios

Views: 3,864

Rating: 4.9789472 out of 5

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Id: lea_zNEXu5s

Length: 56min 49sec (3409 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021