HELP!! Borders??? EASIEST FANCY BORDERS FOR ANY QUILT!!!

hi i'm donna jordan from jordan fabrics today i'm going to show you how to make some fancy but easy borders that you can add to any quilt to make it a lot more fun so i have a quilt top all done and it's ready to have borders put on it so the first thing i'm going to show you how to do is just put a plain border around the quilt because whether you're doing a fancy patch recorder or a plain border the method for measuring it and stitching it on is going to be exactly the same so no matter what kind of border you're putting on your quilt you'll know how to do it the first thing i need to do is figure out how to cut my borders so i always make a sketch of the quilt and then i put the borders on it doesn't really matter if you want to put your side borders on first and then your top and bottom or you want to do it the other way it's going to take the same amount of borders either way now my quilt i measured it it's 39 by 58 so that means this border that i'm going to put on first is going to be 58 inches and i think that on the quilt i'm doing right now i will cut it two inches wide that means after i stitch it on subtract the seam allowances it's going to be one and a half inches finished so it's going to be a nice narrow border so that means that this border on the top and bottom it's going to be 39 plus one and a half on each end so it's going to be 42 inches so now i need 42 plus 58 plus 42 plus 58 to get all the way around the quilt so let's add that up 42 plus 58 plus 42 plus 58. so we're going to need 200 inches of border i'm gonna write that down here now my fabric is about 42 43 inches wide but some fabrics have a selvage printed so i figure i can always get at least 40 inches so i'm going to get this 200 and i'm going to divide it by 40 inches now i got exactly five pieces that means if i cut five pieces of fabric like this sew them all together it'll be long enough but five is kind of close so i'm going to cut six pieces at two and a half at two inches now this fabric doesn't have a one-way design if you had a stripe or a certain motif that had an up and a down you might need to cut your borders the other way but most fabrics you can successfully cut this way and stitch them into one long piece so to figure out how much yardage you need for your border look at how many strips you figured you need i need six for my quilt and the width you're going to cut them i'm going to cut them two inches and just multiply so i need 12 inches of running yardage so i'm probably going to buy 3 8 or half a yard if i needed to cut them five inches wide six times five is 30 i'm probably going to buy a yard of fabric now we're going to take all of our cut border pieces right to the sewing machine and i'm just going to sew them into one really long piece now i'm just going to iron this so that all the seams are laying flat and it'll be real easy to get it onto the quilt now instead of measuring the border and cutting it to a certain size it's much easier to take your border and lay it right on your quilt so my quilt is laid out flat on the table here and i'm going to line this up with the edge here not on the very edge of the quilt somewhere in the middle and i'm just going to smooth it down all the way down here and then when i get to the end i'm going to cut it off and the easiest way to get a straight cut is to fold it back on itself so the fold is even with the edge of the quilt put your scissors in there you can put your blade right up against that fold and cut now i'm going to do the same thing another time so i'll get two borders one for each of the sides of the quilt so the reason i like to do this somewhere near the middle or not along the edge is because if you have bias edges if you have any patches that have bias edges on your quilt when you're smoothing this out you could and you're on the edge you could be stretching it so let me show you what i mean so say this is on the edge of your quilt we've got straight grains here and here and these don't really stretch very much but this is a bias edge and this will stretch a lot so if you're smoothing your border out here you could stretch this as you're smoothing it out and then what will happen is as you go all the way around the quilt your border will be bigger than the rest of your quilt so when you lay it out in the middle that can't happen now i'm just going to pin this along the edge here before i stitch it on now i'm just going to make sure everything is lined up and make sure my border is right along the edge of my patchwork and stitch it on with a careful quarter inch seam now i'm just going to finger press the seam here away from any of the patrick so i'm going to press it out to the side and i always like if i see any threads here as i'm going i like to trim them off right now keeps the quilt a lot neater now i'm going to use the same method to do the borders this way so i'm going to lay it out nice and flat [Music] so i'm going to put this on the very edge smooth it across and trim it to size so that's the method that you use to put any border on a quilt so if you're going to put two or three borders on here you're going to use exactly the same method if you're going to put a patchwork border on here you're going to use exactly the same method every time to measure and stitch it on so the first fancy border i'm going to show you how to make is called the diamonds border and that's what we've got on this quilt here and it's made with strips of fabric and i used jelly roll size strips so these are two and a half inch strips and i've picked out some that will go with this quilt so i added a few extra fabrics that aren't in the patchwork so that the border will be a little bit more colorful now we're going to take these strips and we're going to make a strip unit normally when i make a strip unit i put the strips side by side i line up the tops stitch all the way down the seam but for this i'm going to move it down two inches two inches because that's how wide my strip is going to finish after i have seam allowances in it it's cut two and a half two inches finished size now the reason i'm going to move it down is because when we get it all done and we cut it we will have almost zero waste and i like having zero waste i like being able to use up all of my extra pieces for all of the patchwork that i make so just lay one strip on top of the other use a quarter inch seam and don't stretch either one and stitch all the way down to the far end now i'm going to open this up and finger press the seam to one side so i'm just pulling these open and you can kind of feel with your fingertip if the seam allowance is going to the side there and once you can feel it just draw your fingernail or even just the tip of your finger right down that seam and that'll make it lay nice and flat until we get the whole unit made and then we can iron it now we're going to take the next strip and it's going to go over here but again we're going to move it down two inches so i've got this little measuring tape here you can bring a ruler over if you need to and we'll sew this strip on even though it's finger pressed you do want to lay it on an ironing board smooth it out get it nice and flat and then steam press it now i'm going to slide this over onto my cutting board this cutting board and most cutting boards have a diagonal liner on them it's it's a 45 degree angle and it's the most common line they will have drawn besides the grid lines here so we're going to put the strip unit on one of these lines and then i'm just going to slide it back so that i'm not wasting any fabric and i can make a cut here that's about as far as i can get so i'm going to move this over here and i'm going to cut right along this line now you can see why these are all moved down two inches because if they were all coming to the end here all of this would be waste but when i cut it like this we're not only losing just a little bit there now we are going to cut two and a half inch strips so i've got two and a half inches i can use my plastic ruler line that up on my cut edge and make a cut now you can see we've got the border right there so i'm just going to keep making two and a half inch cuts until i have cut up all of this strip unit now we're just going to sew these into one long piece so sewing these together is a little bit tricky because when you put them right sides together you need to know where do i put it so we want to line up these raw edges obviously now if we line them up like this we could stitch from here to here but we're going to have about a one inch seam allowance we want a quarter inch seam allowance so we want a quarter inch from the raw edge to where those meet it's a little bit easier if i show you on one where i drew a quarter inch seam allowance so i have a pencil line here now if we match up the edges and that pencil line goes right to where that green is there right to where that green is there we can just stitch on that pencil line and you'll see what it looks like and this just takes a little bit of practice every time i do this for the first time i'm not as straight as i would like to be and i sometimes have to take the seam out but basically if you open this up you should and you iron it you should have a nice line here and a nice line here with everything meeting up mine is not perfect yet but it's it's pretty darn close so just keep adding your pieces by putting the right sides together there and then sliding it until it's a quarter inch away there and then make your seam see if this one's better yeah that one's better just perfect now all we need to do is iron that one seam that seam that we just did there because the rest of these have already been ironed now you do want to be careful that you don't stretch it because all the edges are bias so just carefully lay it down and you can iron the whole thing first if you want like this but at some point you're going to want to trim off that little extra seam allowance there which we call a dog ear so i just like to take my scissors and just snip that off now let's see what this looks like up against the quilt i like that so i added more colors other colors that weren't in the patchwork here i added a little bit lighter this dark green it's that color but it's a little different and i i like adding extra colors there now to put this onto the quilt we're going to use exactly the same method that we used earlier for these first borders we're just going to lay it down very carefully fold it and cut it and i'm going to do the folding and cutting at both ends because that end is not straight yet so i'm going to cut this one here and i'm not going to worry about where the patchwork ends there i'm just going to fold it and cut it off even and then i'm going to move this over to the edge and pin it on and again you have to be careful because the border is all biased and it could stretch but since we've cut it exactly to the length we need we can lay it right down on here and pin it and it will fit on there perfectly without stretching while we sew the next border i'm going to show you is a quarter square triangle border so i've got a couple little quilts that have this border on them so this has quarter square triangles all the way around all four sides now this one here it's got quarter square triangles but it's only on two of the sides so let me show you exactly how to make these i'm going to make my quarter square triangles from five inch squares these are charm squares so i'm going to make two stacks here i'm going to put half in one stack and half in the other and i'm just going to put the greener ones over here and the lavender ones over there so i've got half here and half here now to make quarter square triangles we're going to start by making half square triangles so the method i like best for making half square triangles is you take one of the squares you draw a diagonal line i'm just going to use a pencil right across the middle there and we're going to put that on top of a different color square and take it over to the sewing machine now we're just going to stitch a quarter inch away from that drawn line on both sides so i'm going to go down the one side and my presser foot happens to be a quarter inch wide so i can just put my presser foot right on that line it's very convenient then i'll just spin it around and go down the other side now we're simply going to cut right along the drawn line and then take these to the ironing board now i like to peel the top layer open so that i can make sure that the seam here stays straight and i'm not pushing it and distorting it i kind of press it down with my hands then i'm going to grab the iron and give it a little steam and then the last step we want to trim off those little dog ears so the dog here is that little extra bit of seam allowance and i just like to trim that off even with the raw edge it makes the block nice and neat and it reduces bulk when we sew this block to other blocks once you've got your half square triangles done grab two different ones and we're going to put them right sides together like this and i've got this seam allowance going that way and on the back one i've got it going the opposite way so it's real easy to get them lined up perfectly but before we sew them we need to draw a line so we're going to draw a line on the back that's going in the opposite direction to that seam we've got in it then we're going to head back to the machine so i'm going to line them up again here and use exactly the same procedure we did last time we're going to stitch down the one side and back up the other a quarter inch away from that drawn line now we're going to cut one more time along that line now when we open this up look what we've got we've got four different prints all in one block and it doesn't really matter which fabrics you use just try to get four different ones each time you pick up a pair and match it up so that your blocks are nice and interesting you do want to trim off those two dog ears here as well and i'm going to go ahead and stitch up the rest of the blocks into quarter square triangles once you've got all these blocks done head back over to the sewing machine so you can lay it out ahead of time if you want to see what color is going to go next to what i'm just going to turn these around as i go and make sure that i don't put two of the same colors right next to each other so i don't want to do that i'm just going to spin it see what looks good so let's take these first two they're exactly the same size now the seam allowances may nest like i've got here that makes it easy to sew together but sometimes depending on how you have it turned for instance if i did it like this all the seam allowances are going in the same direction and that's okay you can still sew it together it just doesn't lay quite as flat as when they're nesting now i'm just going to finger press all of these seams in the same direction so pull it open a little bit draw your finger down there same thing here and just keep adding squares till you get it all in one long big long piece so i actually didn't sew all of the blocks into one long piece because i thought i might not want to make this extra long and cut it off in the middle of a block i think i'd like whole blocks to show so this is just slightly shorter than my whole quilt and so all i'm going to do to make this fit is take some extra fabric i've got a couple extra five inch squares and i'm going to stitch one onto each end so i'm going to stitch this onto here and then i'm going to trim it so it's the same width stitch one on to the far end of the border and then i'll have a border that's slightly longer than my quilt and i'm going to fold it in half and find the middle of it and put that right here in the middle of the quilt and stitch in both directions and then simply trim off the extra and what we'll end up with is just a little bit of extra fabric on the end there now if you do want your pieced border to fit exactly on your quilt it is possible but you have to do a little bit of advanced planning so this quilt here my pieced border it fits just exactly onto my middle section here and the way i did that was i adjusted how big this border was so that when i put these on it would be the right length so on our purple green quilt i could have made my first border a little wider or a little narrower so that i could exactly fit that pieced border on there now for our third fancy border we're gonna do the one that's showing here these on point squares now the easiest way to make this is with some jelly roll strips or even half jelly roll strips and then cut some yardage into three and a half inch strips and i can see here i'm gonna have to iron this up before i cut it now it's always a good idea to iron your fabrics before you cut them this one happens to be particularly badly wrinkled but even if it's not your cuts will be more accurate if you get everything ironed nice and flat now since i'm using half jelly roll pieces i am also going to split these strips if you're using whole jelly roll pieces you would want to leave these whole also now take one of your jelly roll strips and we're going to put these wider strips onto both sides of that so i'm just going to put them right sides together and stitch down using a quarter inch seam and now we'll put strip onto this side so i'm just gonna spin it around now i'm gonna finger press all of the seams toward the purple now we're going to want to iron these up even though we finger press them they're not completely flat now we're going to sub cut this so i'm going to line it up on one of the lines on my cutting board and i'm going to cut it into two and a half inch strips now to stitch these into a border we're just going to move this down so that that intersection meets so i'm going to put it right sides together and you can even feel if they're meeting because this seam allowance is going down and that one's going up so this is just loose here so you can start the very top of that first strip now we're on both pieces and just stitch all the way down now i'm going to finger press right now i'm going to finger press this to the right you don't have to press this part all the way down it doesn't matter if that goes part way each way it doesn't matter just press at least to the end of here now the next piece again slide it down match that up and stitch it on these stitch surprisingly quickly i made four border pieces here two shorter ones and two longer ones and of course your sizes may be different than the sizes i made they'll depend on whatever on the size quilt you have so this has been finger pressed but i'm still going to smooth it out here and then iron it and you don't need to worry about the seam allowances here if they open up a little bit i'll show you on the back side here they don't have to stay a quarter inch all the way down it doesn't matter if they go to zero you just want it ironed to one side where it's stitched now we're going to put this on our cutting mat and i'm going to take the two inch line let's flip it over right there the two inch line on my ruler and i'm going to put that line on these intersections so i'm going to line it up here and then i'm going to trim off all this extra stuff on this side here slide it up a little get all that off now we're going to flip this around and we're going to do the same thing on the other side so again put the two inch line on those intersections and what we're going to end up with is a nice four inch wide border and we've got exactly the same amount on each side of all of these patchwork pieces there that looks really good on there and you certainly could make this border as long as the quilt and simply cut off the excess i would like to center this on the side here and instead of just cutting this off somewhere in here i'm going to neaten it up a little by putting some of this background on each end so i've just got an extra three and a half inch wide piece and it's as long as these um strip sets were and i'm going to just stitch this onto here so i'm just going to make sure it's at least a quarter inch beyond that corner there and stitch it on with a quarter inch seam and i know it feels awkward because it's not the right shape and it doesn't seem like it will fit on there but all i'm going to do is iron this cut it this way and cut it this way i've got that extra piece stitched on both ends of the border here so now i'm just going to continue the straight line i've got there trim off the excess here and the same thing over here trim that off even and now i'm going to line this up on the cutting board line and i'm just going to make sure i have it straight here and cut that off now that looks good now i just want to see how much more i'm going to need on each end so if i fold this in half and here's the middle of my quilt [Music] i'm going to need about 12 inches added here i'm going to cut it a couple inches bigger always cut it a few inches bigger so i'm going to stitch that on it's going to be four inches wide which is how wide this is on each end and then i'll bring it right back okay so i'm going to find the center of the patchwork again that's right here and i'm going to lay this on top of the quilt again not on the very end somewhere up a little bit and then i'm just going to trim off the extra from each end here and then i can pin it on to the end and stitch it on and remember these edges on your border are biased so you have to be real careful you don't stretch them as you sew them on but if you pin it carefully it won't stretch at all so i've got borders onto all four sides of this and i'm really happy with how it turned out now you could put another border all the way around if you like i think i'm just going to put some purple binding and that will make a nice frame here now my patchwork it's centered here but let's say you only have a little bit of extra scrap from your quilt and you want to just do a couple of these squares you could just put three squares here and three squares here and the same thing on the far corner so you don't have to do it all the way around like i've got it here the the other borders we made here's these guys can't really tell what it looks like when you put it on the patchwork we can kind of see it there that one was really fun this one again really fun and this one might be a good one to put another border all the way around it so that you're kind of sandwiching the patchwork between solider pieces because that highlights the patchwork so i hope this gives you some fun ideas about adding some extra fancy borders to your patchwork because you know once you have the middle of your quilt done it's nice to put something a little bit different on the borders it really makes it unique and special and it really can kick up the look of your quilt quite a bit and it's a lot of fun thanks for watching our tutorial today on how to make fancy borders we hope you enjoyed it now if you have questions you can leave them in the comments below and i'll be sure to answer them now we always do a giveaway at the end of each video so today we're going to give away two items this is a table runner and it's made from a pattern called tree lot it's made with jelly roll strips and it's nice and long you could use it as a wall hanging or as a table runner and then we're also going to give away this fun wall hanging that i showed you earlier in the video with the patchwork border so it's very easy to enter the giveaway just click the link that below that says giveaway and you enter your email and your name and you could win one of these quilts 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 you

Channel: Jordan Fabrics

Views: 415,162

Rating: 4.9540229 out of 5

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, fancy, wasy, diamond, shaped, quarter, square, half, triangle, triangles, build, stitch, howto, easy, fast, make, learn, teach, fun, hobby, arts, crafts, hobbie

Id: kvmDEefv31c

Length: 34min 14sec (2054 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020