FINISH YOUR QUILTS! How to - BORDERS, BACKING, BINDING, QUILTING - For ANY Quilt Top!!

hi i'm donna jordan from jordan fabrics today i'm going to show you all the steps you need to take to finish your quilt that's the borders the backing the quilting and the binding so let's get started now most of my tutorials in fact most of the quilting tutorials you see on youtube show you how to make a patchwork top and this is one of the fun exciting parts of quilting because you get to see how the pattern builds and you get to see how the colors blend but at this point the quilt is not really that useful you can't put it on your bed you can't snuggle up in it you can't give it as a gift now it's very common for quilters myself included to get a lot of these quilt tops done maybe a whole stack of them the nice thing is all the steps from here on out to get these finished are exactly the same now once your cool top is done the first thing we're going to add is borders now these are the borders here i've got a small light one and then a big dark one not every patchwork quilt needs borders but most quilts look good with a border around it it stops your eye from all that patchwork it stops it it frames it nicely and it just makes the patchwork look like a picture in the middle so some things to consider when you're picking out borders how much bigger do i want my quilt to be do i want it to be a little bit darker do i want it to be a little bit lighter and so then you can kind of put some fabrics underneath here and you can see what's going to happen when you put something around it this is nice because the patchwork kind of floats into it now i wouldn't finish with that border i would want to put something darker around it so if i put a first border here and a second border here it's going to make it quite gray if i wanted it to be pinker that's really going to pull the pink out that's a little too stark for me but if you're trying to make that color pop more that would be a good choice i think that i'm going to use a small border of this and then a big border of this because this is a nice big print so i will often use a larger scale print if i want a bigger border now of course you have options when you're putting the borders on two borders three borders one border and it's totally a matter of personal preference i will often do one small border and one big border but there are times when maybe i want three borders and then i might make them all exactly the same size again i like to lay the fabrics against the patchwork and just see what seems to be pleasing to me now if you're making a quilt from a pattern the pattern will usually tell you how wide to cut your borders and how much fabric you need for them if you're not if you have some patchwork and you want to figure out how much fabric do i cut for the borders here's what i do now my quilt is 50 inches by 50 inches so my first border is going to get stitched onto the top and the bottom first and so it needs to be 50 inches long and i'm going to cut this 2 inches wide that's how big i'm going to cut that first border then i'm going to stitch the same border onto the sides now the sides are now a little bit longer because they're the 50 inches that we had for the quilt plus whatever the border is there so i'm going to cut it about 54 inches long i know it's not going to end up exactly that size because i've got some seam allowances here but right now i'm just trying to figure out how much fabric do i cut to get all the way around there now i'm just going to add up all four borders the length of all four borders so i've got 50 inches plus 54 plus 50 plus 54. so i'm going to need 208 inches that's how long i would need if this was in one long piece so i'm just going to jot that down here now the fabrics that we use quilting fabrics they're 42 43 44 inches wide i always figure that i can get 40 inches from each width so i'm going to take my 208 inches and i'm going to divide by 40 and it's 5.2 so i'm gonna have to round up i need six pieces at two inches wide so that means i'm going to cut six strips of fabric that are the width of the fabric here and sew them into one long piece and i know that i will have plenty to get around all four sides now i'm going to cut right off the bolt but i'm sure you don't have a bolt of fabric at home so here's how you figure out how much yardage you need we need six at two inches so that's going to be exactly 12 inches but i would recommend you buy a half a yard because you don't want to have exactly the amount you need because there's nothing worse than making a little cutting error and not having enough to cut your quilt out properly i'm going to take these right over to the machine and i'm going to stitch them into one really long piece so we'll take the first one put these right sides together now i've got the selvedges on here still so i'm going to take a rather deep seam allowance to make sure that none of those selvedges will show so i'm doing about an inch here and then i'm just going to take my scissors and i'm just going to trim it off so there's about a quarter inch left and you might want to just double check that none of the white portion or the printed portion of the selvedge is showing in your seam there now i'm going to iron the whole border and i'm going to press the seam allowance when i come to it to one side now i know that we made that little sketch with the exact size of how big our quilt was but i'm not going to cut my borders to that size i'm going to lay the border on top of the quilt i've got the quilt spread out nice and flat and i'm going to move up about a foot or so from the edge of the quilt and i'm going to smooth this along the quilt and i'm going to cut it exactly that length now the easiest way for me to get it straight is to fold it here and then put my scissors right in here and i'll get a nice straight cut now the reason i lay this in the middle of the quilt and not on the edge is because with some patchwork patterns there's bias edges along here and they can stretch and so if i put this right along the outside sometimes the outsides are a little bit ripply and a little bit bigger and if i lay it in here it will help the whole quilt lay flat when we're all done with it now i'm simply going to move this down to the edge here and put some pins in and and then i can do the same thing for the other end of the quilt i'm going to take this right to the machine and since it's pinned on it's pretty easy to stitch it so i'm just going to keep making sure that it's right along the edge of the patchwork and i'm going to stitch it on with a very careful quarter inch seam so you have to keep looking make sure your bottom patchwork is right underneath there and just stitch all the way down the side here now i'm going to finger press the border and i'm going to press all the seam allowances toward the border now i know sometimes people want to press towards the dark part but when we have all of these seam allowances here the seam this seam allowance really wants to lay that way a lot easier so i'm going to press toward the border the whole way down and i'm not going to iron this until i get all the borders on but the finger pressing will keep it laying nice and flat now that we've got the top and bottom borders on we're going to use the same procedure for the sides so i'm just going to go somewhere in the middle here smooth it out cut it to length pin it on and sew it on now for the second border we're going to use the same method to figure out how much fabric we need now the quilt is bigger now because we added those borders earlier so now the quilt it's about 54 inches it's not quite that big because we had seam allowances but we're going to use those numbers because we'll it'll help us make sure we have enough length for our borders so these are going to be 54 inches long and i'm going to cut this border wider i'm going to cut it four and a half inches so it'll be nice and wide so that means when i add this border here it's going to need to be longer it's going to need to be 54 plus about four and a half here and four and a half here so that's about nine inches longer so it's going to be about 63 inches so again i'm going to add those up and i'm going to divide by 40 inches to see how many pieces of fabric i need 54 plus 63 plus 54 plus 63 so that's a total of 234 inches if it was one long piece and then i'm going to divide by 40 inches because that's how big each strip of fabric is and i come up with 5.85 so again if i cut six strips that are four and a half inches wide that will be enough to go on all four sides now to get my six at four and a half inches if i multiply that out it's exactly 26 inches i'm going to say a yard i'm going to start with a yard so i have enough in case i make a cutting error once all the borders are on and you've got the whole top done it's a good idea to iron it nice and flat the next thing we need to work on is the backing now my quilt top turned out 60 by 60 inches and i'm using fabric that is only about 42 43 inches wide so i'm going to need more than one piece to get the 60 by 60. so what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut two pieces of fabric and i'm going to seam them together now you always want to have your backing bigger than your top most quilters if they're going to put it on a quilting machine they're going to want it 66 by 66 inches they're going to want three inches all the way around the edges so i'm going to cut a 66 inch piece of fabric and then i'm going to cut another 66 and i'm going to seam it down the middle and it's going to be quite a bit wider than i need but it's going to be about 6 inches longer than the top i've got my two 66 inch pieces and i'm going to just open these up and put them right sides together and then i'm going to take a fairly deep seam here because i want to make sure that my selvedges don't show once in a while you will get a fabric where this selvage edge is pulling a little bit and doesn't seem to lay flat if that's the case then you're going to want to cut off the selvage edges this one is a robert kaufman print it's laying nice and flat so i'm just going to leave the selvages on here [Music] now i'm going to finger press this seam open now if you had a really light backing fabric you probably would want to trim this part off because that writing there could possibly show through i have a nice dark print so it's not going to show through and i like to leave the seam allowance big because that actually helps it stay nice and flat when i put the quilt together so the back is all done now if you're making a really big quilt you might need three lengths of fabric to get your whole quilt back bigger than the top you just want to always have three inches on all edges bigger than the quilt top for your backing it's okay if it's more than three inches you just don't want it any closer than that now we're ready to move on to the quilting now while we refer to all of the parts of making a quilt as quilting technically that term the quilting is the stitching here that holds the backing and the top and the batting in between all together now you can have a lot of fun with quilting i've got spider webs on here on my halloween quilt or you can keep it simpler you can just follow the patchwork now i wanted to talk to you a little bit about batting batting is what goes between the top and the back it makes your quilt nice and warm and it gives it a little bit of thickness now this is a big roll of batting there's a lot of different kinds of batting i like hobbes batting it's 80 cotton and 20 polyester and it's kind of bonded so it's not going to peel up or come apart but this is fairly thin batting a lot of quilters have preferences for what kind of batting they use but this is just a nice all-purpose batting now i have it on a roll but it also comes in packages so you want to get your batting about six inches bigger than your top the exact same way you did on your backing so the first kind of quilting i'm going to show you is called stitch in the ditch and all that means is we're going to stitch right in the ditch that's right along a seam line and i use that method on all of my small projects all table runners all small wall hangings and all you have to do to get it ready is sandwich the top the batting and the back and then put some pins around the edges and some pins in the middle so we can take this right over to the sewing machine and the first thing i'm going to do is just stitch right around the edge about an eighth of an inch away from the edge here just to anchor everything down and keep everything from moving and then i can lose these outside pins here so once you've got that stitched around the edges you need to decide how you want to quilt this you can quilt it anywhere you've got stitching so i'm just going to do these diagonal lines at first then i may decide to add other quilting afterwards but i recommend starting with less quilting because you can always add more but you don't want to start out with a lot and then change your mind because you don't want to take all that stitching out you can just keep adding more stitching so what we're going to do is we're going to go right in this seam here so we call it stitching in the ditch i do like to call it stitching near the ditch so i'm going to backtrack a little and then i'm going to try to have my needle right in the ditch where that seam is and it's really okay if you go a little right or a little left just try to hold the seam open and stitch carefully right along your other stitching and it's pretty easy when you're going on the diagonal like i'm going here because the backing has a little bit of give to it then because it's on the bias now there's that stitching line there and you'll see more and more lines as we go so here's another one that's already finished it's all stitched in the ditch around these diamonds here and so i want to show you what a different pattern looks like these are about two inches apart and you can see on the back side here we've got these bigger and bigger diamonds so you can do almost any pattern depending on whatever patchwork you've got here you could also go this way and this way you just want to keep your quilting stitches about four inches apart at their widest so that everything stays together and this will last a nice long time even with repeated washings now the second way to get your quilt finished is to have it quilted on a long arm machine like this great big one that i've got over here now most people don't have one of these machines at their home but there's a lot of long arm quilters who will do this as a service for you you could ask at your local quilt store or add a quilt guild and they can give you a recommendation so i'm just going to show you the steps that they would follow after you give your quilt to them so we're going to load the back first we're going to basically be making a quilt sandwich just like we did when we quilted in the ditch but all the parts are going to be loaded onto these big long arms here on the machine now the quilt is all loaded up on the machine and so we've got the top and the batting and the backing it's sandwiched together just like we did when we did our stitch in the ditch quilt what's nice here is that the machine is hooked up to a computer and the computer program has lots of different quilting patterns that it will use to quilt your whole quilt so i've got i've got other patterns we can use and there's another one there so most quilters will have a variety of designs that you can pick from the other nice thing about having the computerized program is that you can scale it so if you like your quilt to be quilted with a really small pattern and a lot of quilting all over it you can do that if you want it really big and barely any quilting you can do that also and these are things you can discuss with your long armor and they give you recommendations for what pattern and what scale will look good on your patrick quilt okay i've got it all programmed i've got the pattern so that it will fit the quilt there's a lot of steps involved with getting that set up and i don't want to show you all those now because i just want to show you how to finish your quilt but if you're interested in seeing how that works how you get the computer program onto your quilt let me know in the comments below and if enough people are interested i'd be happy to make a video to show you how that works now if i've done everything correctly when i press this button the machine will go to the beginning of the first row here and then i'll press the button again and it will start to quilt [Applause] [Applause] now we're able to see the quilting padding we can see the leaves here we can see the swirls and we can really start to see the quilt come to life now there's a third method of quilting and that's called free motion quilting now free motion quilting is very similar to what the machine is doing behind me there except instead of a computer controlling the sewing you grab the handles and you move the machine and that determines what pattern you make now you don't have to have a big machine like this to do free motion quilting you can do it on a home machine you do need to have a machine that you can drop the feed dog on so the feed dog that's these little teeth under here that normally pull the fabric through as you sew if you drop them down then you can put the fabric on here under here and you can move your quilt in any direction now free motion quilting it's kind of its own special thing within quilting and it's a lot of fun to do but it's not something that i've done a lot of myself but there are a lot of resources if you want to learn how there's books there's classes there's a lot of videos on youtube that will show you exactly how to get started free motion quilting now no matter how you got your quilting done there's only one step left and that's the binding the binding is what is going to cover up the edges here and finish off the quilt so to prepare to put the binding on i'm going to trim off the excess batting and backing so that it's even with the raw edge of the top of the quilt and i'm going to use my rotary cutter and just trim along here now when i pick a fabric for the binding i want some something that will look good against the border something that will look good with the patchwork and i like to get a contrast color and i'll just hold up a little bit of it against the quilt that would be pretty it's kind of pink for me this one's a little too busy for me but it would work personally i don't like light binding very often because this part of the quilt gets touched a lot and it it can get dirty this is good it's darker it's a little more solid also it will look very good against the back side so i'm going to go with that one now i like to cut my binding into two and a half inch strips and that's the same size as a jelly roll strip so if you have a project that used those and you have leftovers you can use those for binding or if you have some leftover from another project and they match you can use different colored jelly roll strips and have a multi-colored binding to figure out how many strips you need we're going to use the same procedure that we did when we figured out how much border fabric my quilt is 60 inches square that's 240 inches all the way around divide by 40 inches that gives me six strips now i'm going to cut seven strips because i like to have a little bit extra for when i fold the corners now i'm just going to sew these together into one really long strip and again i'm going to use a big seam allowance so that none of this white part will show and then i'm going to trim each seam down to about a quarter inch now once you have this sewn into one long piece we're going to want to iron these seam allowances open because that helps when you put the binding on the quilt it helps so there's not too much bulk all in one spot once those seams are all open we're going to take this and fold it in half the long way and then iron it so your iron can kind of help hold it down keep folding and i find that the steam works really well and i'm going to do this all the way down the whole long piece of binding okay so here's the whole long piece of binding and i've got my quilt here and i like to start about a foot from the one end of the quilt there and leave about six inches at the beginning and line up all your raw edges and then we're going to stitch this on using a quarter inch seam so i've got all the raw edges lined up and i'm just going to keep lining it up and stitching around the quilt so i'll show you what we have to do when we get to the corners but for now i'm going to go down this long side here now as you come to the corner here you're going to want to stitch to where you are one quarter inch away from this bottom edge so sometimes i will put a pin right there you can mark it with a chalk pencil just something so that you know when you stitch down you're about a quarter inch up from the bottom there so i'm going to go here and then i'm going to back tack when i get there take it off of the machine and now we're going to pivot the quilt we're going to turn this 90 degrees and then fold your binding up like this so i've got a 45 degree angle there and that fold is pointing right to the corner of the quilt and then fold it down so that this fold is even with that edge so what we've got here is a little flap that could go back and forth now we already stitched to that spot we want to start our new stitching in the same spot which is basically right here again you can put a pin in there if you want to put a dot there with a chalk pencil that works also so i'm going to move this over to the machine and i'm going to put my needle down right there by hand and then i'm just going to go forward and back a little so i've got some nice back tacking now i'm going to continue all the way around the quilt doing each corner the way i just showed you now i've come around the last corner and i'm going to stop a couple inches from the edge here so i've got a big tail here and a tail here so first step let's cut this off nice and straight let's cut off that selvage now we're going to want to seam these two together using about a quarter inch seam allowance so that means i need a half inch of overlap there so i'm just going to hold my fingernail there and then i'm going to fold it right in that spot so i've got about a half inch overlap cut it off and now i'm going to seam this together using a quarter inch seam takes a little straightening there we go now i'm just going to finger press the seam allowance open because that really helps it lay the flattest when you're doing binding refold it there and now we'll just stitch this last little bit down there now the binding is stitched onto the top of the quilt all the way around the next step is to open this up and finger press so just pull it open and slide your finger nail or your finger all the way down it's kind of thick but it really helps it lay flat when you do this all the way around the quilt now we've got our folded edge here and we are going to turn this over all of those raw edges to the back of the quilt now if you like you can turn this back and you can stitch this all down by hand and then it will be pretty much invisible but that takes me too long i'm always in kind of a hurry so i find that if i turn it back and then i stitch right in the ditch here it's going to catch the back of it with a little seam so let me show you what i'm talking about i'm folding it over slide it under the machine stitch right in the ditch and that stitching is going to be just about indivi invisible let me show you let me get a little bit of its own you can see so this is what it's going to look like on the back side it's stitched very close to the edge of my binding so i'm going to go all the way down this side here i'm going to fold it all the way over those raw edges put it here in front of my machine and then stitch so you can only do three or four inches at a time some people like to pin the binding or use some clips around the edges but i really find if you fold it over firmly and just stitch that that really works the best now as i come to the corner here i am going to take the opposite side of where i'm sewing not this not this side this side and i'm going to turn it to the back here and head towards the corner and you're going to see a 45 degree angle there where it's folded so it's turned to the back and this part is sticking off then i'm going to fold this right here even with the edge of the corner there and now we've got everything turned to the back but it's not very neat right there i've got a little bit too much folded so i'm going to take a straight pin put it in that fold and just pivot that down a little bit what we want is this here this nice 45 degree fold right in the corner like it looks like a mitered corner and i'm just going to hold everything and stitch to the corner and have my needle stop right there with the needle down then turn a little bit more on this edge to the back lift your presser foot pivot everything and keep stitching and that's how you get a nice neat corner on your quilt so here's what that looks like from the front and from the back we've got that nice 45 degree angle there and nice there so i'm just going to continue putting the binding on turning the corners until the whole quilt is done the quilt is all done now we put the borders on it we added a back we got it all quilted and then we finished it up with binding and the methods we used they will work on any patchwork top that you need to get finished up now these are just some of the ways you can use to get your quilt finished these are methods that i use a lot but they're by no means the only methods to finish your quilt as an example i've got a little table topper i did here on my home machine and i didn't quilt it in the ditch i went inside the patchwork here i added some lines here there's another method called quilt as you go with quilt as you go you make your patchwork and you get it quilted at the same time by sewing through all the layers all at once there's a lot of different ways and if you make a lot of quilts you can try all the methods and see which one you like the best because there's not a right or wrong there's just preferences there's things you like that's the great thing about quilting now just as a side note i didn't mention which pattern i used to make the patchwork here and it's called the five star quilt and if you're interested in making this we do have a video and a free pattern and i'll put the links for both of those in the description below this video thanks for watching our video today on how to get your quilt top finished up we hope you enjoyed it now there's one more thing at the end of every video we always do a giveaway and today's giveaway is for a quilt called yin yang this is a nice big batik quilt it's got nice warm golds and browns all hoffman batiks made with a jelly roll and it's very very easy to enter the giveaway all you have to do is click the link below that says giveaway and put in your email address and your name and remember we can send this to the winner anywhere in the world so good luck now if you like our videos and you want to support us the best thing you can do is subscribe to our youtube channel that would really help us out happy quilting [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jordan Fabrics

Views: 1,171,963

Keywords: Quilt, quilting, quilts, 12 block, log cabin, fabric, fabrics, pre cuts, table runner, table runners, sew, sewing, log cabin 12 blocks, Jordan Fabrics, Jordan's, jordan, floating point, Floating Point, Donna Jordan, Matt Jordan, Patterns, 4k, Batik Bali Batik, bali batik' sister's choice, tutorial, let's make, vlog, quilt shop, quilt store, border, borders, backing, back, bind, binding, top, any, finish, strong

Id: SE5CqpWaReA

Length: 35min 6sec (2106 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020