Quilting 101: How to Bind a Quilt

hey everyone welcome back to my channel we're continuing on with our quilting 101 series today and today we're going to learn all about how to make binding now binding is this cute little sashing strip that basically goes all the way around the outside of your quilt and it just finishes off your rough edges and makes it all nice and pretty there's a lot of options on how to bind I'm going to show you two ways to do it the two ways that I use the most frequently and then I'm going to show you some tips and tricks that I think hopefully will help you as well so if you're ready to learn about binding let's get started alright so before I bind my quotes I always square them up and I have this nice big 15 1/2 inch square ruler that I place on one of my corners and I kind of line it up with the edges I also am kind of looking at my binding edges I mean things get crooked and kind of pushed out when you've quilted so you know just kind of make it look halfway decent and then I also put my long ruler right up next to it along the edge kind of line that up along this edge of fabric as well now if I have a little bit where it got wavy then I just scoot it in so that I'm catching the fabric and not leaving any white so the first thing I do is I start on the corner up here and I go ahead and just trim that off and then come this way and now my corner is basically squared up and this is on my nice big table and I'll just kind of slice this out of the way and then I'm just going to continue going down the edge of my quilt following this long ruler until I get to the other corner and then I'll put this on the other corner and just keep cutting you all right so to figure out how many strips of binding I need to cut I like to use my iPhone and this is the quilters paradise website they have free web calculators I know there's some apps out there I'm not going to name them but I have had some issues with the wrong amounts being given and so this is actually my favorite one if anything I've had a little bit extra which I prefer so all you do is you pick the binding calculator and then you put in up here it says default with the fabric is 43 if yours is different you can put different a lot of times I'll cut scrap a binding out of fat quarters so you'll just want to put like 18 inches or 24 whatever piece of size pieces you have the next thing that you put in is your width and your length of your quilt so mine is 70 by 60 and then I always do my binding at two and a half inches wide that gives me enough to fold over and not feel like I'm going to be hitting the binding on the other side or anything like that and then I just hit this little calculate button and it comes up down here with how much I need to what the total length is how many strips to cut for my width of fabric and how many yardages I need if I need to go by the yardage so I just find this little tool really helpful I use it all the time alright so my little quilt calculator told me I needed to cut seven strips of binding so I've got all that cut out it's two inches two and a half inches wide and then I've cut off the salvage edge as well so now I'm going to take it over to my machine and sew it together okay so we're at my machine and I just have my quarter of an inch foot on right here and I'm just doing a straight stitch across now as I mentioned before you can do bias binding I'm for this particular part I'm going to show you how to do straight binding and then I'll show you how to do bias binding right after I think that straight binding is probably a little bit easier if you're just beginning alright so to do just a straight edge binding I just put my two pieces of sashing right sides together and I just line up the corners and then I'm just going to see um so a quarter of an inch strip right here down the edge okay and then now I'm going to take this piece is top piece and flip it over so it's right-side up so this piece is the other end of this piece I'm just going to flip it right side up and now I'm going to grab another piece of sashing another strip and put it on here here's the end of it so sometimes I'll just leave the end right there so it's kind of ready for me to grab and then I'm just going to sew that so I'll grab this end and then just grab another strip and then I'll just keep adding strips like that you all right so really quickly I wanted to show you how to do the bias finding now this is good if you're doing like binding for an apron and you need it to be able to be bendable also if you just want like the look of it better sometimes it can have a little bit less thickness because you're going to be sewing at a diagonal so again kind of like the straightedge binding where we put these two edges together instead what we're going to do is still right sides together but we're going to turn them like this we're going to sew from this corner to this corner now sometimes it's hard for me to tell where this corner is so I'll just leave a little bit peeking out the other trick I do is fold my edge and just kind of finger press it and then that gives me a sew line so we'll put it on here and just line up your edges up there this is slightly harder because like I mentioned if you saw the cutting video we're working on the bias now but if you just line up this edge and this edge then you should be alright and then what you're going to do is this stitch a diagonal line from corner to corner here and then you will trim this off at a quarter of an inch and as you can see once you trim that off see I even slipped a little bit which is partly why I don't like this binding as much but then when you open it up you've got a diagonal seam instead of a straight seam and then when you fold it in half it kind of helps distribute some of the bulk of your fabric so you have a little bit less bulk there so that's another option I think it's a little bit harder for beginners to do that so it's totally up to you but try either way see what you're comfortable with and or what fits your fabric better as well sometimes that you know if I have diagonal stripes on my fabric or something I'll go with a biased edge binding so but that's just how you'll so each of the strips end to end together and instead of sewing them straight across you'll sew them at this diagonal and then trim it off leaving a quarter of an inch and then press them open that way so when I iron my binding I like to line it all up like this these are all of my themes that we just sew together and I also press them open as opposed to pressing them one way because in just a second we're going to take these pieces and fold them in half and then you'll have all of your seam allowance on one side so in order to reduce bulk I just press them all open and if you have them all in a line like this you can kind of just go down the line and it makes for really quick seam ironing all right then if I have anything too crazy I'll just hit it really quick there you go so our seams are ironed open now if you were to do the bias edge you just do the same thing finger press open your seam really quick and then hit it with the iron and wallah and then what that does is when you fold that over as you can see you have just the bulk is kind of right here where the corner is and then it's kind of dispersed a little bit better so again it's totally optional whichever way you prefer to do your binding all right so to iron my binding I have it wrong side facing me so this the pretty side will be down on to your ironing board and again you can kind of do this whichever way suits you best but you're going to fold your binding in half and then you're just going to hit it with your iron and really you can kind of just keep pulling it I have the bulk of my binding just laying off the edge of my ironing board over there and I just keep pulling it now as you can see we've got a seam coming which is no big deal because they've already been ironed open so we're just going to continue with that pulling our fabric and then when you go to iron your seam here just make sure that it stays open so when you press it you've got all four of your seams still open so that you don't get any extra bolt in that area and then you're just going to continue I usually hit it a little bit more on the seams just because it can be a little bit thicker there but it's not usually a big issue and then you're just going to continue going down your strip of fabric until you get it all nice and pressed out you so I get asked why I write wind up my binding like this for a number of reasons and one thing is that it makes for really cute pictures because it's super cute little roll another thing is because it's a good way to kind of store your binding until you're ready to use it if you're not going to use it right at that second and then the third reason that I do this is going to be a little bit different for everybody but I have this nice extension table and so I actually lift it up place my binding there and then as I go to sew my binding on it just holds my binding from going all over the floor I have a cat and a dog and they like to play with this it's just a nice little way to keep it kind of organized and then I just pull it out almost like a spool of thread so that is why I do that you certainly don't have to do it I think it's a super cute way to do it I've also seen people put these on their thread spool holders up on top of their machine and then just pull it down that way so this just works for me and if you have an extension table or something similar then maybe it'll work for you too so we're ready to quilt we're going to take our binding and just lay it on one of the edges of our quilt and I'm laying my rough edge of my binding along with the rough raw edge of my quilt so as you can see the folded binding edge is going to be pointing towards the inside of your quilt and I usually start somewhere in the middle of the bottom or one of the sides of my quilt it doesn't really matter the only thing that really matters is you don't want to be starting on one of your corners so this is about the center of the bottom and I've put my quarter of an inch foot back on because that works the best for me I've seen people do this with their walking foot also and then I usually leave a tail of about I don't know six to eight inches or so of loose binding and you're going to see why in a little bit when we connect the edges together go ahead and turn on my machine and I just have my machine set at a regular straight stitch you can increase it if you're having a hard time going through all of this fabric you can increase your stitch length mine is just set at two point four stitch length then it seems to work for me so I'm going to go ahead and take a couple of stitches and do a backstitch it's just to kind of secure it it's not like a huge deal and then I'm just gonna go around the quilt about a quarter of an inch sometimes I get a little bit off but it's not you know anything critical all right now we're coming to our first corner so when we get to our first corner we're going to stop a quarter of an inch away from the edge of the fabric so just right about here and I have little markers on my foot so I'm going to kind of watch those okay so my marker on my foot is about with the edge of my fabric so now I'm actually going to lift my foot with my needle in the down position and just turn it at a slight angle and then I'm going to run back stitch and just a couple forwards and then I'm going to cut it okay alright so to create your first corner you're going to take your binding edge and just hold it with your finger here and pull the binding straight back so it's in line with the raw edge of the the quilt over here okay and then just holding it carefully you're going to pull it back down so that you've got this kind of little flip right here and you're going to hold that flip nice and flat with the edge that you're about to sew down and we're going to bring that back over to our machine and sew a quarter of an inch and continue all the way until we get to the next corner all right so I'm nearing my next corner here we're going to do the same thing stop one quarter an inch away backstage at a slight angle forward stiff just a little bit cut it okay I'm going to turn on our quilt and then we're going to do the same thing I'm going to just hold it down here pull it straight with the edge of the quilt here and then fold it back down so we've got our little mitered corner piece here and then we're going to just continue on like that all the way around the quilt and I will show you what to do when we get to the end and we need to join these pieces together you okay so I'm getting to be about I would say good maybe 12 inches from my other strip where I started so I'm going to go ahead and stop here I'm just going to do a quick back stitch a couple forward stitches and clip it and then let's go and I will show you how to attach this binding okay so here we have our opening for our binding and what I'm going to do since I did straight binding for this I'm actually going to do the same for connecting it on this side and I'll show you how to do the bias one also but first let's do the straight binding so what I'm going to do is kind of find a center point in between my two opening spots and so I'm going to just lay this one down nice and flat and just kind of keep you know an eye on that if you want to mark it with your fingernail or something and then I'll go ahead and just trim that quickly now I wouldn't necessarily probably isn't the safest way to do this but I do just run a quick line using the mat lines here with my rotary blade and just cut it off so I've got like a nice spot to start and then I take my other strip and lay it on top of it and I'm just going to measure a quarter of an inch overlap so here's where this one stops I'm going to go over a quarter of an inch mark my fabric and as you can see I'm not really measuring I'm just kind of eyeballing it and then I'm going to go ahead and put that crease on my mat here and again just cut a quick straight line using the line on my mat okay you can throw these to the side now the next thing that I'm going to do is attach these two right sides together so I just open up the right side here open up the left side and then line those up right sides together now if this is your first time I would suggest pinning these so that when you get them over to the machine they aren't you know messed up or gone the wrong direction or whatever and you can also just check really quickly before you sew it whether or not it's going to work because when you pull this flat you should have your seam right here and it should be nice and flat against your quilt okay and mine is so I'm going to just kind of fold it over flatten it out so it's a little bit easier for me take this over to my machine and stitch a quarter of an inch down this edge right here so let's go do that since there can be a little bit of a tension on this I go ahead and fold my quilt in half to just relieve that tension so that I can run it through my machine without there being any pulling or anything like that and again I'll come back over here and I didn't quite line these up straight so I'll just fix that but I do know they're at least in the right direction and then we're going to sew a quarter of an inch like I said down this edge and you do want to try and line that up pretty good because you only gave yourself a quarter of an inch and here we go okay now when we open this up our binding should fold nice and flat and be going the correct direction which ours is so we're good to go next thing I'll do is just open it back up and since I finger pressed alright since I earned my seams open I'm just going to finger press this one open and then go ahead and just lay it down kind of press it just slightly and now we're ready to just continue pick up back where we were so here's our stitch I'm about probably half inch back I'm just going to do a quick back stitch to start again and then we'll go all the way through to the other side and I just pass out my other stitches where they started about a half inch or so again do a back stitch to secure and we're done so one thing I want to point out quickly is when I'm sewing my binding on I always sew it on the front side of my quote first then when I'm done I'm going to flip it around and stitch it on the back side and you can hand stitch this or machine stitch this I'm going to show you how to machine stitch or hand so you can pick which one you prefer so let's get started okay so I wanted to quickly show you how to do binding on the bias so pretend like there's a quilt under here and we're coming to the point we've quilted all the way around or added our binding all the way around and we need to attach these two pieces together so what we're going to do is I'm just going to take a pair of scissors and snip off my binding doesn't matter how much you snip off what matters is how white it is so we're going to take this width and that's how much we want these two pieces to overlap okay so like that alright so we're going to overlap them by whatever the width of your binding is this is two and a half inch binding so I'm going to overlap by two and a half inches if you did three inches binding you'd overlap by three inches etc so we're going to kind of pretend like I went ahead and did that okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to attach it just like we attached it when we were making the bias binding so you're going to want it to be right sides together so we're going to open up this one okay and then we're going to attach it though on a bias okay so you're going to sew from this corner to this corner and like I did when I was making my binding I like to just make myself a mark to follow so I would sew down this now to check and just make sure that this is going to work out I like to put a couple pins in along that line okay and then now when we pull our binding taut pretend like we've stitched right here and cut that off at a quarter of an inch then when we go to pull it flat it should line up nice and straight like that now you've got basically a bias seam for your binding and you've completed and you've attached your binding from one end to the other with the same bias seem that you used when you created your binding strips so now that I know that that's correct I'll bring this over to my sewing machine okay all right so now I'm going to go ahead and just verify that this worked by folding my binding before I cut it and it looks good so now we can go ahead and trim this off at a quarter leaving a quarter of an inch let's go ahead and trim that edge there now because I had previously pressed my seams open I would just go ahead and finger press that open fold it in half make sure everything looks straight and then we're good to go to finish sewing our binding onto our quilt all right so as you've probably noticed I'm using my quarter of an inch foot to sew on my binding I'm doing that because I've never had a problem with it or you know having it scrunch my fabric or anything like that and also I use this tiny little section on my foot to help me when I machine stitch it on the backside if you're having a hard time using your regular quarter of an inch foot you can always grab your walking foot and just you know that should help you pull your fabric through a little more evenly I find that it's harder for me to see what I'm doing using this so I typically do not however like I said if you're having troubles this might be a good solution for you okay so I flipped my quilt over this is the back side and I'm going to go ahead and just pull my binding out and then just pull it to the edge now my goal here is that here's my stitch length or my stitch from the front side when I attach my binding to the front and I want to stitch at least just on the other side of that I don't want to hit that again because if I hit that line it means that I'm going to be showing my stitches on the front of my binding and you don't want to see that so the easiest way to tell is AI can see right now that I can pull this far enough to pass my stitch line I'll also be able to hear it if I hit it on my machine you'll hear a nice loud clanking noise and that means that I got onto my binding so I want to try and avoid that any of these little strips if they're really long I'll cut threads off but for the most part I just kind of tuck them into the binding and then I'm just going to roll it over with my feet and again like where I started my binding I'm starting approximately somewhere in the middle don't you just don't want to start on a corner is the only thing now I've barely lined my fabric up with this little edge on my foot here and I'm going to go ahead and do a front and back stitch just to secure it and I just go kind of slow here now every now and then my binding will get pulled up in between this little crack right here and I just lift it up lift my foot up and put it back down and that usually corrects that problem and now I just go around my quilt just carefully making sure that I'm staying on this edge and like I said I'm also listening to my machine for any lab clanking to make sure that I'm not getting the front side of my binding all right so we're coming to our first corner and my binding was kind of flipped over the backside so all I do is flip it around to the front side and then I always fold up the bottom edge first and then fold over this side so I'm going to fold this side up and then carefully hold it with my finger and fold this side over and then I do my best to get a little point right here now mine is kind of overlapping so I'll just fold it slightly more kind of tug it if you have to but your goal is to get a nice little point right there in the corner and just make sure you get on to this piece before you lift up your presser foot to turn your quilt so with my needle in the down position I'm going to lift up my presser foot and carefully rotate my quilt readjust this new strip of binding here go ahead and put my foot down and just continue one okay so hopefully you can see I'm just really barely catching the edge of my binding here and then if you flip it over to the front side you can see this stitch line so that's something to keep in mind when you're choosing thread color since I quilted with white I wasn't all that worried about it but I'm not catching my actual binding so here's my stitch line and then here's the binding and I haven't hit that so we're doing good so I'm just going to go ahead and finish up alright so I'm at my next corner and I just do the same exact thing as last one I'm just going to fold up this side kind of hold it and then fold over this side so that you have a little point here and I'm just going to kind of adjust it until I have a nice corner right there again I'm going to go slowly make sure I get into this piece of binding before I lift up my foot needle down position fold it over lower your presser foot and keep on going all right I'm almost back to where I started and I'm just going to be careful to try and line up with my original thread and now you go past it just a little bit do a couple of back stitches to secure my binding and we're all done all right so two hand by and all I've done is get myself a needle and this is just a regular embroidery needle it's got a little bigger eye on it just because I have a hard time threading my needles and then I have not too long of a section and I use my seam aurifil 50 white thread and I just go ahead and tie it and knot in it and to do that I just wrap it around my finger and then roll it off and pull it and it just creates a nice little knot if it's not a very big knot I'll usually do it twice but that one's fine now to start off I just place my needle somewhere in between here's my stitch line in the edge so I place my needle somewhere between there so it's not sticking out and just pull it through that way this little thread is hidden and now I'm going to go ahead and fold over my binding and just come out right at the edge I'm just taking a little tiny bite out of the edge of my binding now I'm going to go underneath and pick up some on my white and then just again pop out right at the edge now I'm doing this in white just so you can hopefully see my stitches a little bit better if I were going to do this um for you know to keep it then I would probably match my thread to my binding so I would be using a red thread because that's where you're going to see your little bites but as you can see it's just this tiny little bite right here so again pretty much where this thread comes out I'm going to go in right there again and then back out right just taking off a tiny little bite out of the very edge of that fold and I'm just going to keep on going that way until I get to this corner up here and once you get used to this it goes really fast as you can see teeny tiny little bites and I'm not going through to my front side either so you're going to want to just use whatever thread correlates with your binding the most so it'll stay hidden and as you can see with this first one I kind of took a bigger stitch to try and show you guys but now you can barely even see these and once you're done you really want but we'll see them at all you may consider using a symbol that might also be an option in case you are worried about hooking yourself or anything like that and you are going to want to pull these tight as you go and we're going to get all the way up here and I'll show you how to do this corner and as you can see you've got this nice little you can kind of see puckers where I've stitched which you really can't see the stitching even with the white thread and I would say my stitches are about maybe quarter inch apart or you can go even closer if you're worried about it coming loose okay now we're coming to this corner and for this step I'll either use binding clips or sometimes I'll just hold it with my fingers but we've got it to this point I'm going to just lay it flat and then carefully fold it over so that I've been lining up these corners right here as best as I can and hopefully you can kind of see the bulk of my binding is on this side so when I fold it over I want the bulk of my binding on the opposite side that way you've got it kind of dispersed just slightly so we're going to keep going I'm just going to hold this and now this is where you're going to kind of want the thread that matches your binding for sure because you're going to see I said I like to secure these corners just a little bit better when I'm hand binding I don't always do this when I'm stitching with my machine but when I'm hand binding I usually sew up this little corner so what I'm doing now is I'm coming up but I'm also just grabbing the bare corner barely the corner of this piece also okay and then now I'm going to go underneath here and kind of a similar situation I'm going to come up just on the edge of this binding up here again I'm going to go down into the bottom and then out through this little fold just slightly you just want to take teeny tiny little bites and I usually just go up this once and then back down just to kind of secure it and I don't want to come out too much because I don't want to see it okay so there you have that corner and you can't really see your stitches but I just like to do that when I'm hand stitching because I feel like it's not quite as as secure as when I machine stitching my binding on now I'm back down at the bottom and I'm going to start coming out down at the edge of this other side and now we're going to turn and just keep going with that same just taking little little tiny bites out of the bottom and little tiny bites out of your binding now obviously this method does take a little bit longer but one thing that's nice about it is that you don't have traces of your binding stitching on the front of your quilt and for the most part on the backside you really can't see it all that much so it'd be even more hidden if I were to be using red thread instead of this white one to try and kind of show you guys what I'm doing all right so that's it that's how you hand bite back of your quilt again when you put your binding on the first time you put it on the front and then you can flip it over and then hand stitch it on to the back all right everyone so those are my helpful tips on binding I hope they help some of you out and as I mentioned I'm doing giveaways for all my videos so today's giveaway is sponsored by fat quarter shop they're giving away one of these super cute kits of the clover binding clips I mentioned them in my supplies video so if you missed that go back and check that one out with their fun little clips you can use them for a variety of uses I typically use them if I'm going to be hand binding something you can also use them if you have really thick fabric where pins aren't working quite as well and we've used them for other things too so they're just a great little notion to have in your sewing kit so if you're interested in winning those then head over to I'll put a link in my blog on in the description box below head over there and enter to win the giveaway for this week's video so I hope you enjoy this and I will see you for the next one you

Channel: Erica Arndt

Views: 264,561

Rating: 4.8522587 out of 5

Keywords: Tutorial, Sewing, Quilting, Binding, How To, Quilt

Id: Q1vICZf9_Ys

Length: 36min 8sec (2168 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2016