Curved Edge Quilts with Bias Binding

Every once in a while I make a quilt that seems like it just needs a little something extra at the end. And I've started doing something that is really fun and adds a lot of interest to the quilt. And that is to put a curved edge on the quilt and then to bind it with a bias binding. And you can see on this little quilt that I've just added real gentle curves around the edges and then finished it with a bias binding. And we're going to also talk today about how to do binding completely by the machine, so not a single hand stitch is necessary. And we'll start by taking our finished quilt. You've done all the quilting and we need to add those curves to the edges. And I usually just use some household items. These happen to be lids off of coffee cans and I want to mark the curves on the edges of my quilt and I really like things that are asymmetrical. So I don't worry too much about having the curves of the quilt be perfectly even, I don't care if the spacing is a little wonky or the height of the curves is slightly different in places. I think actually that makes for a more interesting piece. So if you prefer something more mathematically correct, you can figure it out so that the math comes out perfectly. But I just take my household item and I'm going to mark a gentle curve. I usually use the same item on all four corners of the quilt, so that all four corners match, I do kind of like that part to be symmetrical. And I don't go too far around the lid here because I'm going to make the next curve start to go up already right away here. So I sort of try to plan ahead a little bit. I know that I want another curve here. So I might space this one about halfway through and I would draw around this little curve. I'm going to connect these little lines. I might straighten this line out just a tad. And it just doesn't bother me at all if they're not absolutely perfect all the way around. So I'm going to mark my whole quilt in this way. I one time did the curves with a rotary cutter without marking. And you can certainly do that, but it's a little more risky because you can't plan ahead very much about where the curves will go. So you want to mark the whole quilt and then with the rotary cutter, you want to cut on your marks and you can use a regular sized rotary cutter but actually a little smaller one works a little better because you can maneuver it more easily. So I'm just gonna carefully go around my mark. I can cut with either hand and my rotary cutter which is a skill that is really handy if you can ever learn that. And I'm going to be very careful about cutting towards yourself. So you can see that I make my curves in this way. When you get all finished, you'll have something that looks like this. You can make the curves more gentle or you can make the curves pretty significant like on this piece, it's kind of up to you. And you can see also on this little one here on this end, the curve doesn't match this end, but that doesn't bother me at all. The next thing I'm going to do is to prepare a bias binding. And you have to have bias to go around curves because a straight binding won't turn nicely on those curved edges but a bias binding will curve around there beautifully. So to prepare a bias binding, take your binding fabric on a rotary mat. And you want to use a ruler that has a 45 degree angle marked on it. And so I'm going to use the 45 degree mark along the salvage here and I'll make sure that my ruler is placed so that I can cut along the ruler to both ends of the fabric. And I'm using my 45 degree mark to establish the bias. So this mark on the ruler along the salvage is helping me to establish that I have a true bias at 45 degrees right along here. So then I would want to make my first cut to cut my binding strips. Notice that this is a stripe where the stripe runs lengthwise on the fabric. It runs along the salvage but stripes are a really thing to use for bias binding. And you'll see why in just one minute. I'm gonna continue cutting. Our standard width for cutting bindings straight or bias is two and a quarter. I need to nudge that up just a tad. So I'll cut as many strips as I need. And I have found that the curves on the edge of the quilt require just smidgen more length of binding but it's not as much as you would think so you don't have to figure a whole lot of extra. So you'll have your strips. And then what you want to do is take this to the sewing machine where you'll join these end to end with a diagonal seam. You can see that when you cut bias strips you end up with these funny points at the end. And I find that those are sometimes confusing. And because you're going to lose that fabric anyway it's going to go to waste no matter what, I just go ahead and get rid of it now because it's simpler. And I want to put the fabrics right sides together. I want to put them at a right angle, 45 degrees, just like so. And what I want to do is sew from this intersection up here down to this intersection here, and the way to remember that it's from this one to this one, and not this one to this one is that you want to be sewing from a corner that has a short end and a long end to another corner that has a short end and a long end. You do not want to sew from two short ends to two long ends because you'll get yourself in trouble every time. So that's a little way to remember. You can mark this seam line if you like or you can place a pin there and take it to your sewing machine and eyeball it. Or if you have the proper markings on your sewing machine you can use those to guide you to sew from this point to this point. So what you end up with is this. There's your bias binding joined with the diagonal seam. So you would want to do that with all of the strips so that you have one long continuous binding strip to put around the edge of your quilt. You need to do a little bit of trimming here. You can either use a scissors or a rotary cutter and you want to trim away these triangles and just get rid of those. They're waste. Leaving about a fourth of an inch of a seam allowance here. Now it's time to do a little pressing. And I usually press this seam just to the side. I know a few people press it open and I think it's really a matter of personal preference. I don't think it matters too much in the end which way you press it, but you want to give that a good press. Now you want to turn the binding so it's wrong sides together, and you want to press a crease down the middle so that you're pressing the binding in half along its entire length. So you can see on this little plaid, some interesting things start to happen with the pattern of the fabric, kind of get these diagonal lines going on which will be very interesting on the edge of a quilt. When you do a stripe, this was a stripe that ran along the salvage, and I cut the strips on the bias. And you can see when you fold it in half and prepare it like I just showed you, the stripes go diagonally. So these stripes will go diagonally along the curves of the quilt and will add a lot of interest to the edges. So I've prepared my whole binding and I'll take it to the sewing machine so that I can do the next step. So I've brought my finished quilt with it's curvy edges all trimmed up to the machine and I've brought my prepared bias binding with me and it's time to sew the binding to the quilt. You'll notice on the edges of the quilt that there is a line of stitching just about an eighth of an inch inside the edges. There are two different times that you can do that stitching. You can actually do it right after you mark the curves, stitch right on your marks. And then when you cut, cut just an eighth of an inch outside the mark, or you can cut the curves and then do the little basting stitch. Whenever you choose to do it though, it's a good idea because it helps hold all the layers together so you don't get a lot of tucks and puckers as you're going. So for this technique, which is completely by machine, you're going to sew the binding to the back of the quilt. You can see the more colorful part here is the front. And I want to sew this to the back of the quilt. Most people have accidentally sewn it to the front at one point or another. So that's an important thing to remember. You want to sell it to the back of the quilt. And you want to leave yourself a tail here with which to work later. You'll be glad that you have that when it's time to join ends. And what you're going to do is sew it to the back of the quilt with a quarter inch seam and you've attached a walking foot to your sewing machine. You have to learn here to worry about maybe only an inch or an inch and a half of the binding at a time. Because of the curves and the tightness of the curves, you can't worry about too much more of the binding than that at once. So if you just focus on maybe an inch or an inch and a half at a time, sew that, and then kind of pivot, move on and then place the next inch or so, sew that, and then whenever you come to a curve that's fairly tight, you can stop with your needle down and you can just pivot the quilt. So let's go on under the machine and add this to the back of the quilt. And for this technique, I'm sewing a scant quarter inch seam allowance. Make any adjustments that you need to make because you want it to be pretty skint. So now you've added the binding to the curved edges of your finished quilt and you've come to the place where the binding ends meet. And you want to stop sewing that binding far enough in advance so that you give yourself a little bit of space here to work, and you have a tail on each end. And if you have excess here, now you can cut it off and get rid of it. You can tell you have plenty to go around that curve, but you don't want two or three feet extra because it just gets in your way. So the first thing you'll do is you're going to take a little snip. You're going to create a little system that'll help know where you can match up these binding ends to sew them together. You're going to do that by just laying everything nice and flat, lay the binding along the edge of the quilt like so. One end comes in from the left and gets folded back and the other end comes in from the right and gets folded back. So you just want everything to meet real nice right there. And you have to coax it just a little bit sometimes. So everything's meeting up real nice. And then you're gonna take a real sharp scissors. You're gonna go right in here like so and take a little snip about an eighth of an inch in. So you've got this little snip now that's going to tell you exactly where those ends will meet. Now, this next part can be a little bit tricky but once you've done it a couple of times, you'll you'll understand it better. The tail on the right gets unfolded and it goes up and away from you. And the tail on the left gets unfolded and it comes across the other one. Now I'm going to look for those little snips. Here's one little snip and here's my other little snip. So this one's away from me and this one is across to the right and I'm going to match up those little snips right there. I'm going to place the binding ends at a 45 degree angle to each other. And I'll put a pin right there. And in much the same way as we joined the strips earlier, we'll sew now from this intersection up here down to this intersection here, and you can see I really kind of cut it tight as far as how much space I left myself to work. So I might take a few of these stitches out to give myself just a little more working space before I put this underneath the machine. You can either mark this sewing line corner to corner or you can eyeball it or you can use the lines that are marked on your machine. So the really nice thing about this technique is that I can check and make sure that I've done this correctly before I cut off the ends of the binding. So I usually always check just to make sure did I do it correctly? Did I sew in the right direction? And it looks like I'm okay. So I'll take out my pin and cut these little ends off leaving a fourth of an inch seam allowance, get rid of those. So now I'm ready to put this back under the machine and I'll finish sewing the rest of the seam. Okay, so I finished, let me shut this curve. Which takes me to my next step. So I'm closing in on the end here and I'm going to pull the binding to the front of the quilt. This red part is the quilt front. And one of the first things I want to do is to set up my machine properly. So I want to put monofilament thread in the top of the machine, and I want to put a bobbin that has thread that matches the backing of the quilt. I want to use my walking foot and I want to set it with a stitch called a blind hem stitch. And I'll show you what the blind hem stitch looks like. Blind hem stitch goes straight, straight, zig, straight, straight, zig. And so you want the straight stitches to be on the quilt front. You want the little zig to take a tiny little bite into the binding. This is the binding here. So it's not really proportional but you get the idea straight, straight, zig, straight, straight zig. And if you set your stitch width and length both two about one, so they're very, very tiny stitches, that'll be about right. And just to illustrate, I've done that here on the quilt with black thread so that you can see the little straight stitches are on the quilt front. And then the zig takes a tiny little bite into the bias binding. So of course I wouldn't use black thread. I would use monofilament like I have here. And you can see that on the quilt front, it's pretty much invisible. There are little needle holes right now once the quilt is washed, or if you run your fingernail over it, those will disappear. And then if you look on the back of the quilt you can see that that line of blind hem stitch runs just inside that binding. So you've got a beautiful binding when it's all said and done, you haven't done a single stitch by hand and you've added a little pizazz to your quilt with some curves around its edges. So next time you have a quilt that needs a little something extra, give it a try.