Cutting Long Quilt Borders

Heather Thomas

Duration: 5 mins

Description
Discussions
Transcript

Description

Cutting long quilt borders that are perfectly straight can be difficult. Heather Thomas shows you her technique for folding and cutting borders that come out perfect every time with no waves, ‘elbows’ or any other issues.

Folding and Cutting

The first step in cutting long quilt borders is folding your fabric down to a manageable size that will fit on your cutting mat. While this may seem simple, there are several steps that need to be taken to ensure that the fabric is on the straight of grain and as flat as possible. Heather explains how she gets the fabric on the straight of grain by ripping two edges. Once the edges have been ripped and pressed if necessary, she aligns them and works at smoothing out the fabric to a fold. She explains that when cutting long quilt borders it is important to always do this step and refold the fabric rather than use the fold already in the fabric as it is not usually on grain. Heather then shows how to fold and align the fabric further to get it to fit on her cutting mat. She also shares a fun tip on how to use a long ruler to make sure the fabric has a crisp fold and is as flat as possible. Heather then trues up an edge and explains how the fabric is now ready to be used to cut long borders. She then talks about the different ways the fabric can be positioned when cutting the borders depending on whether you like to cut based off of the marks of the ruler or the marks of the cutting mat. She then cuts a long border and unfolds the fabric to show that it is straight with now waves, elbows or other issues. Once you’ve mastered the technique of cutting long quilt borders, learn more about working with borders.

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12 Responses to “Cutting Long Quilt Borders”

Anne Pearson March 2nd, 2024

I’m brand new to quilting. Which “ends” do you rip? The selvedge sides or the other two sides? If you buy a kit, will there be enough extra fabric to tear any off? Do you start to rip with a scissor snip?
Lori Smanski January 17th, 2022

Thank you so much for sharing these simple techniques. This will help a lot.
Valeria January 17th, 2022

Thank you so much for your wonderful instructions! I feel very confident after watching you.
Evelyn Clayton January 17th, 2022

Question…..are you cutting on the straight of grain? Not really clear on the video
Vicki February 4th, 2020

I would love to get a response to what to do when the fabric is still wonky after ripping - the straight of grain edges are not perpendicular to the selvages.
NICOLE March 12th, 2019

Is there any reason not to tear the border strips to desired width (other than the annoying strings?)
E Nelms January 14th, 2019

Excellent technique. But what if the fabric has been skewed on the bolt? Even tearing the ends leaves it wonky. I have learned to slightly stretch fat quarters and other small pieces of fabric to get warp & woof lined up squarely, but what about a really long piece that is skewed?
Joan August 15th, 2017

Great instructional video - first time I have seen the ruler tip, and even though my quilt shop tears fabric rather than cuts it, this is the first time I have seen someone do this to cut strips. Great lesson
Michele July 13th, 2017

Unfortunately this video is not playing for me. I am so sad because I have this exact problem and need the help!!
Lisa Lauziere July 12th, 2017

Wonderful teacher! Clear, succinct, good filming. Best I've seen in.... almost ever.

Forming fabrics so that they're small enough to fit on your cutting board, so that you can cut long strips either for strip sets or for borders can be a little bit flummoxing sometimes. You're like, "How I go about doing this?" So, I'm gonna show you how I go about doing it. And other people might do it some other way, and that's great too, as long as it works. But what we're trying to do is end up with strips that don't have any narrow areas or wide areas. Strips that are actually all the same width when we're done. And so I've got a piece of fabric here that's about 72 inches long, and I know that these two ends of it are very true. And I know they're true because I've ripped them. So that's always the very first thing I do is I rip the two far ends of the fabric and it will rip true to grain. And therefore I know that it's straight. And so that's the very first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to line up those two ripped edges. And then I know that that is a straight edge that I can use. So once I've lined up those two edges, and that becomes a straight edge that I can use, I am then going to work myself up to a fold. And once I work myself up to a fold, that fold then also becomes a straight edge. Now you can iron that fold if you want to and make it really crisp, or you can finger press that fold, it's up to you. And I am simply going to finger press it, like so. Now once I've done that, I'm going to take my fabric, and I'm going to put it on my cutting surface, on my mat here, and I'm going to put it so that this true edge is going to be on one of the straight lines, like so. And what I'm going to do first is I'm going to true-up an edge, but I can't do that until I have now taken this fold and lined it up with that also. So what I want is the fold and the raw edge, so I'm going to kind of do this here, are lined up with each other, as perfectly as I can get them. And I'm gonna use this ruler, insert it in there, and pull this fabric like so, so that I don't have any excess in this fold over here. I'm gonna make sure I have no excess in this fold here either by pushing that ruler in there and then pulling it out. 'Cause if I have excess in there then I'm going to end up with a very funky shaped strip. Then I'm gonna line it up with that straight edge. And this should be lined up also. That looks really good. And then I can go ahead and make my first cut. So I'm gonna square up this edge or true up this edge. Now depending on how wide I'm going to cut and what kind of ruler I have, I can go ahead and turn this whole thing around very carefully and cut off of my ruler rather than off of my mat, or I can simply move my ruler. Well, I wanna make four and a half inch strips. So I'm going to go ahead and leave it on the map, mat itself, move over, four and a half inches and cut. And then the moment of truth will show if I can open this up, and I have a nice straight, nothing gerknunckly there. And, where this fold was, nice and straight, and nothing gerknunckly there. Gerknunckly, that's a really proper word but it just means a mistake, something that's not good. So this is how we got, we are going to cut something that's very long and we can't fit on our mat by itself. We want to make sure that we start with something that we can determine is a straight edge. And that is not the fold. The fold could be totally off. It's ripping off those two ends to find the true grain and matching those two ends up and then pushing in the fold in the middle. That's the trick. So rip those two ends off. You're going to lose a little bit of fabric, that's okay. Make sure that you buy excess so that that's not a problem. And then fold it just like I showed you and you'll have wonderfully, perfectly straight, long strips of fabric to use for your borders and to use for binding and to use if you're doing strip sets.

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