My No Fail Method To Do Mitered Borders That Anyone Can Do For Quilting | Heidi Pridemore

today what we're going to talk about is borders all things borders and then i'm going to show you our quick and easy method for how to do mitered borders so how many of you guys are worried about miters or don't like doing them i'm going to show you a really slick way to do those i am from the whimsical workshop i appreciate you guys popping by to see us today and we are a design studio here in phoenix arizona we are on youtube pinterest facebook instagram you can find all of those links at our website which is thewhimsicalworkshop.com behind me is our current sew along that's going on it's free through our facebook group heidi's health quilting help desk you just join the group you can follow along every wednesday so without further ado let's get on to borders i'm going to pan the camera down so you can see what i'm doing and i'm going to start with straight borders and actually before i pay any down i want to talk about the math for borders if you ever need to try to figure out how much fabric you need for a border we use a formula here in the studio and we design hundreds of patterns a year so it's a tried and true formula when we're trying to figure our yardage we look at the side that we're going to sew the piece onto if it is less than 42 inches you only need one with a fabric strip because fabric is forty two and a half to forty four and a half inch long if you have a project that is forty two and a half to sixty inches long figure you need one and a half strips so instead of trying to figure out the actual inches we round it up to make it easy and then if you have a project that is 60 inches to 84 inches you would need two strips per side so if you had a quilt that was 84 inches square you need eight border strips two for each side that's a quick and dirty method on how we figure yardage here when we have to deal with borders when you do mitered borders you always want to take your finished side and size and add four inches extra to help you with the miters if it's an extra wide border like a nine inch border i would add nine inches so it's it's you want to add extra because you're going to be creating this point and that is on the finished size which we'll talk about when we get to miters so all right let's pan you down and we're going to talk about borders first thing we're going to talk about is straight borders i just gave you the math for it all of our patterns we will usually tell you to sew your border pieces if you have multiple strips end to end on the diagonal and a beginner doesn't always know what that is so this is kind of a refresher if you already know it but if you're a beginner and you don't understand that this is what we mean you have your two strips you would put them at a right angle and you would sew the diagonal from the top left corner to the lower right corner so that it flips out this is the same way we piece binding strips but that is what we talk about when we say sew on the diagonal the reason we do this is because the eye it's easier for the eye to skip over the pattern on a diagonal seam so it's not as noticeable in the quilt as a straight seam so here is the seam on the diagonal and here is the seam with a straight and this is going to be much more natural to see so that is sewing on the diagonal quick course the only time we sew things on a straight is if we have a straight a linear pattern so here you can see this one is sewn on the diagonal and it's pretty obvious that there's a break in the pattern where this one is sewn on the straight and you can't see it it just sort of goes away so we use diagonal for general prints and we use straight for vertical stripes or vertical designs like this so when we do our borders we pin them on you want to pin your borders on and i'm going to show you a quick and dirty way that we do borders here in the studio i know the rule of thumb is to measure the center of your quilt measure the each end of your quilt and then cut your strips to the average width we usually are doing quilts very very quickly and how we do it is we put fold the quilt in half this is a very little quilt for you we lay our strip on the whole thing fold this back and we cut it we don't get the tape measure out we don't have to measure trust me this works all the time for us and then we go ahead and we pin our borders on and how we pin borders on very quickly is pin one end pin the second end pin the center and then we pin here and here and that will keep the borders even and will keep you from having a ripply border if you have a ripply border a lot of times it's because you haven't pinned it and the feed dogs will pull the bottom faster than the top and it can bring in some excess fabric causing your border to ripple so let's get to the the good part here we're going to talk about mitered borders so for miter borders and what i mean by a mitered border is that it looks like this just hold that behind it is coming out from the point at a 45 degree angle a lot of quilts if you're using a stripe panel or stripe for your border or if you have multiple strips you can do a miter border you do a miter border just to do a miter border but a lot of people are intimidated by them and they struggle with them so i'm going to show you our quick and easy way to do it first you take your strips and you pin it onto your quilt top now i've already sewn three sides on but i left the last one for you so how you do this is instead of going end to end you fold your border in half you find the center of your quilt top usually there's a block or something that lets us know you fold it you align the two centers and you're going to have excess hanging off each side you want that and then you would go ahead and you would pin this in place then when you go over to your sewing machine to sew this border on you sew with the border on the bottom in the quilt top on the top and you start mark it here so you can see it you start a quarter inch away from the edge now i have a bernina and on my foot there is actually a line quarter inch back from the needle that i can use otherwise just take a ruler and mark this you're going to start a quarter inch away when you sew this side on and then when you start the top on you're going into that same spot a quarter inch away that's to give you room to actually miter the corner so you start a quarter inch away you come down here and you stop a quarter inch away and that's how you get your border on so that's this border right here get this out of the way so here it is sewn on a quarter inch from each side you do not press the border at this point don't press anything until all four corners are done so now we're ready to do this corner here and to do your first corner you take your quilt and you fold it to align adjacent sides meaning the side of the quilt comes up to meet the top of the quilt and what that does is it gives you your borders just sticking out so there's the quarter inch where we stopped now you can align your two borders this case i have a sewn border i'm trying to match up if you have a design to match up you can align it and pin it and i usually will pin here's where here's where the quarter inch is so you can see it i usually will pin back here just to hold things in place and i will pin here and then i'll pin down here i just want to anchor everything keep it together but i want to stay out of my way of my court my 45 degree angle now here's how we measure we mark it we take a ruler with a 45 degree line on it so this ruler has let's get the black one so you can see it there's the 45 degree line on my ruler i take the 45 degree line and i align it with the bottom of my border and i take the edge of the ruler and i align it where i stopped sewing okay and then i draw a line from that point all the way out to the edge of my border and i go over to the sewing machine and i start here and i sew all the way out to the end and then i have a mitered corner which i have sewn for you to see right here so that i'll show you it folded again so you can see what it looks like so there is what we folded what we marked these are the excess and then i went over and i sewed on that line and then we open up our quilt there is our perfect miter every time this excess fabric you can just go ahead and cut the excess you can use a ruler if you want to be perfect quarter inch if you don't just take a pair of scissors you cut that away then when all four corners are mitered you go ahead and you press that out so that's how we do a quick miter border i want to show you one other thing that i didn't when i went to pin the border on when you go to pin your borders on you have these flappy things in your way and so if you fold them back like this and like this and then you flip that down and drop a pin in same thing on this side now they're out of your way when you go to align this strip in place so that's just another tip on how to keep these out of your seam when you're sewing it because if you have enough stuff flapping around you can get things caught so that is our quick and dirty miter i want to shout out a thank you to northcott for the fabric that we used for the demo for the miter and the other fabrics came from blank quilting so thank you to both of you for giving us some fabric and again just a quick reminder we are doing a stitch along so long for the next we're in week four of a 10 week sew along this is our dutch wonderland you can either make the entire quilt where the pattern is available on our website or you can just sew along and make 12 inch blocks to make a sampler quilt at the end so and all that information is on our blog and on our facebook group heidi's quilting help desks and if you have questions with miters again this is going to go up on our youtube so you'll be able to just go look for the miter border video they're not as scary as they seem um once you do a couple of them you you'll get the hang of it but this method very easy so you don't have to worry about getting the pleat in your corner and i appreciate you following along and thank you for supporting all of us designers we appreciate it and thanks for watching i hope you've enjoyed this video and if you have make sure you like and subscribe below you can find the whimsical workshop on our website thewhimschoolworkshop.com and that has all links to all of our other social media platforms thanks for joining us

Channel: TheWhimsicalWorkshop

Views: 22,490

Rating: 4.8385649 out of 5

Keywords: learn to quilt, mitered corners, quilt border tutorial, creating quilt borders, how to quilt, how to sew, quilt tutorials, how to quilt for beginners, quilt making, quilting tutorials on youtube, quilting tutorial videos, mitered corners on quilts, mitered corners on quilt borders, quilt patterns, quilt pattern tutorials, quilt tutorials for beginners, learning to quilt a beginners guide, mitered corners quilt border tutorial, heidi pridemore, the whimsical workshop

Id: JP9HFkuM6W4

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020