How to Quickly Calculate Quilt Binding

Binding is the last part of any quilting project. When it's time for the binding, you're almost home. You're ready to run for the stable, like the horses, but you got to do that last little bit first. And for many quilters, the dilemma comes in how much binding do I need to make? How much fabric do I need to buy? Well, you know what? It's very, very easy to figure. And I'm going to show you how. First of all, you need to measure your quilt. I just have a little one here. It's a little table runner, but it works for our purposes. So we need to measure the length. In this case, it's 23 inches. I'm just going to round it to 24 for ease of figuring. And then my width is let's call it 14. So 14 by 24, right? We want two times length, two times the width. So if I have 24 times two equals 48 and we have 14 times two is 28 that's 76 inches, running inches. That is the perimeter of your quilt. Think back to math and geometry. That is the outside edges of your quilt, the running total. Now we want to add 10 inches, all right? And what are those 10 inches for? I will show you. The 10 inches when we make our binding, we're going to start putting it on and you have your tail to start with.. So that's a good five inches right there. You need approximately five. You're going to come along and as you sew, you have to come up and over to make the miter. So every one of those miters takes up some extra fabric. So up and over, up and over, this is just real quick, of course, I do it a lot neater, if I was at the sewing machine and I'm backwards here, up and over, and then I have to have a tail. Now this piece of binding was one I happened to have leftover from another project, so I actually have more than I needed. But the 10 inches is for the tails and you need the tails to bring the binding together, miter it in, splice it in, miter it in. And you just need this for ease of use for manipulating the fabric and you need a little bit for each of the miters. That's where the 10 inches comes in. All right. Now, once we have the 10 inches, we add that to our two times length, two times width that's 86 inches of running binding. So we have 86 inches of binding itself is what we're going to make. How do we know how many strips we're going to cut? Well, if you have your fabric, you're going to be cutting your strips and you need to know how many to cut. Some people like to make their binding at 2 1/2 inches wide. Some make it at 2 1/4 inches. I personally make mine depending on the thickness of the the batting that I'm using. And if it's a flannel quilt or a regular quilt, if it's a traditional pure cotton quilt with pure cotton batting, I usually go two inches, because I like a very nice tight, full batting or binding, so that the edges don't wear. If there's a lot of loose fabric here, your binding will wear and you'll be replacing it in no time. So you want to make a nice stuff tight binding. For me, that's two inches. So for easy math, let's say I'm doing two inch strips, all right? How many do I need? Well, when you cut your fabric across the width of the fabric, this is 40 inches is what we allow, because most fabric is 42 to 45. You never know how much it's going to be. If you pre-shrink it, it will shrink. So the standard rule of thumb is figure 40 inches of width. If I have 86 inches, I'm going to divide it by 40 that's two strips so far with six inches leftover, increase it up for the remainder and you're going to be at three strips, all right? Again, keep in mind this is a small quilt. Three strips. How do I know how much fabric? I've got three strips times two inch width. That's how wide I'm cutting my binding equals six inches, all right? If you're going to be pre-shrinking, you need to allow a little for pre-shrinking. Go ahead and buy it to the nearest eighth or quarter. I would just round this up and say I need 1/4 yard of binding. Now I've got more than enough, all right? An eighth is not enough that's only 4 1/2 inches. A 1/4 of a yard is nine inches. So you'll have a little to spare. Typically, most times, even on a large quilt you're only looking at about 3/8 to 1/2 yard. Hmm. I don't think I've ever seen more than about 5/8 of a yard for binding. So that's the math. It's really simple. Two times length, two times width, 10 inches. That's how much you need for your running inches. Go ahead and figure out the width of the strip that you want. Divide the width of the fabric, 40 inches into whatever your grand total is that tells you how many strips you need. Number of strips, times, whatever width you need rounded to the nearest quarter or eighth yard, your choice. That's how much you need to buy. And now you know how to calculate binding.