How to Sew Perfect Mitered Corners

hi I'm Sarah with Baby Lock and if you've ever had a difficult time with bindings on quilts I've got some great tips for you people struggle with mitered corners and how to finish the ends of their binding but with your machine and a quarter-inch foot you can handle it with ease so I've prepared a little quilt sandwich I've just got an 18 inch square to show you but you can do this on any size quilt I've already quilted it my three layers are together and I have squared the edges so I've got perfect 90-degree corners on my edges everything's nice and straight and flat and you can see that all three of the layers come together perfectly as well the backing isn't sticking out farther or the batting than the front everything's nice and straight next I created a piece of continuous binding your binding strips do not have to be cut on the bias sometimes when I'm working with a stripe I like to cut them on the bias because I like how that looks but when you're binding just a flat square piece like this you don't have to worry about it being cut on a bias if you were working with curved edges you would want it to be I've cut my strips two and a quarter inches that's pretty basic for bindings sometimes I'll cut them to two and an eighth if I want to skinny your binding but two and a quarter is pretty typical I cut several different strips enough that when I piece them together it will go all the way around my project and I sewed them together on an angle I place the two fabrics right sides together at a ninety degree angle and sewed across to get a bias join like this and you can see when I flip it over that I oppressed my seams open as well that'll give us a nice flat bias for us to stitch around after you've sewn all of your strips together impressed your seams open you're going to press that entire piece wrong sides together so you end up with one long skinny strip and you can see your right side of your fabric is on the outside edges then you're going to take one of your short ends and you're you'll cut it at a 45 degree angle and then press a quarter inch seam allowance under this will give us a nice finished edge for when we finished the ends of our binding fold that back over and now we're ready to attach it to our quilt my machine is all set up to do this binding technique I've attached a quarter inch foot some quarter-inch feet have a flange on the side you could use with or without the little guide my feed dogs are up and I've selected a center straight stitch I also like to use an extension table on my machine if you've got one available it helps you to keep your arms rested because if you're working on a large project and you're binding it kind of wants to fall off the edge of the machine if you've just got your standard accessory tray on by having this extension table it gives you a little bit more surface just to hold the quilts up as you attach your binding I also like to utilize a needle down position and some stitching my machine is automatically going to stop with the needle it buried in the fabric in the down position and then I can easily lift my presser foot to reposition my binding strip or my hands and they won't lose my place as I stitch if you don't have an automatic presser foot lift with your pivot position you may want to utilize a knee lift it gives me the ability to keep my hands on my project and go hands-free to lift that presser foot up so to begin you're going to place your binding along the edge that you want to start and finish on now this is the edge of the binding that has the quarter-inch turned under and I'm placing it along one of my long cut edges so that the raw edge of the binding strip is even with the cut edge of the fabric and the fold is in toward the fabric a little farther we're going to begin sewing a couple of inches from the edge that's going to give us a little bit of flexibility up here to join the ends and we want to make sure that as we sew we're sewing one quarter of an inch from that cut edge and when we get about an inch from the corner I'm going to stop and talk to you about how you can get that perfectly mitered corner with your binding as I'm sewing I'm aligning the raw edges with this little indented edge of my quarter inch foot this makes it so that I don't have to worry about maintaining that perfect quarter inch seam allowance I don't have to worry about trying to follow lines on the needle plate around a foot I can just run the edge of the fabric right along that and it keeps me with that perfectly consistent quarter inch if you're looking for a scant quarter inch the opening on my foot is actually big enough that I could move my needle position over to the right one if I really wanted to have a scant quarter inch one more way that this quarter-inch foot makes perfectly mitered corners easy is this little line right on the indentation of the foot here that is exactly one quarter of an inch from the needle so when I continue sewing I'm going to sell so that my edge of my fabric is even with that line which will be exactly one quarter of an inch from my needle and at that point I'm going to pivot my fabric and sew off the corner at an angle and it's this angle that I so that's going to allow me to perfectly miter that corner so here you can see where I've sewn exactly at a quarter of an inch from the edge I've angled and I've now sewn off the corner of my fabric at a forty-five degree angle and that's going to allow me to fold my fabric back along that corner and now when I turn my fabric around I can simply fold that binding strip over top of itself and I'm making sure that I've got the top folded edge flush with the top edge of my fabric the binding is perfectly straight over top of itself so I've got all nice right angles and I've got the cut edge of my binding now along the cut edge of my fabric so it's all nice and square here so now I'll begin sewing right at my top folded edge with that same quarter inch seam and repeat the process exactly the same on the other corner so I've gone around all four corners and now I'm just a couple of inches from where I began my binding and it's time to do the join so what we're going to do is lay everything nice and flat along those cut edges and I can see here where my overlap area is and I'm going to trim off my access finding and that will allow me to lay it right inside of where I began that binding and because I turned the edge under a quarter of an inch it gives me a nice finished look I don't have any raw edges showing now before I begin sewing I want to make sure I keep all those layers secure so for that I use a wonder clip I can clip it together I'll put another one in up top here and now I'm ready to continue sewing with that quarter inch seam and I'll lock in my stitches when I get to where I began my binding so now that you've matched your edges and everything is nice and straight you're ready to give it a good press flip that folded edge of your binding over to the other side press again and you can top stitch it you can hand stitch it or use your favorite decorative stitch so there you have it a simple and perfect mitered corner so be sure to get a quarter inch foot and experiment with binding your quilts and for more education and inspiration check out baby la com you you

Channel: Baby Lock USA & Canada Sewing

Views: 605,055

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Keywords: baby lock, baby lock sewing, baby lock quilting, quilting tutorial, quilt binding, quilting

Id: 6fP5-sVJJdA

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2016