Quilt Binding Tips

When it's time to add binding to a quote project, the instructions will often tell you to join the strips of binding end to end using a diagonal seam. If you'd never done that before, it can be a little bit tricky. So I'd like to show you a few little tips that will help you do it successfully. So when you're joining strips of binding end to end, it can be hard to know which way to sew. You're gonna sew diagonally and if you don't sew in the correct direction, you'll end up with this kind of a problem.

Where what you're trying to create is a long length of binding and you don't want it to turn here so you wanna avoid this mistake. If you've ever made this mistake, you'll definitely remember it but there's an easy way to always know which way to sew. So if you think of this, laying the strips at a 45 degree angle like so or a 90 degree angle, you think of these strips as tails, is one way to talk about it. If you sew from the two short tails to the two long tails, it will always be wrong. So what you wanna always think about is to sew from a short tail and a long tail across to a short tail and a long tail.

Or another way to think of it is, calling these strips streets. If you think of these as dead end streets and these as through streets, you wanna sew from a dead end and a through street across to a dead end and a through street. So this is what you'll have, remember you're gonna sew from a dead end and a through street across to a dead end and a through street. So you place your pins, put this under your machine and sew from this corner to this corner. So you'll end up with something that looks like this.

And before you trim, you always wanna check and make sure that you did it correctly. And if you did, it'll look like this. So then you'll just take a scissors, trim that seam allowance to about a fourth of an inch, discard those and then you'd take it to your ironing board and press. So you can always remember which way to sew so that you get it right. Remember it's a dead end and a through street, you wanna sew from that corner across to the other dead end and through street.

So that's just an easy tip to help you join the strips of binding end to end with a diagonal seam. The other part of joining binding strips together that can be a little bit tricky is when you've sewn the binding all the way around the quilt and you have these ends to deal with now. And how are you gonna figure out how to join those ends? The method that I really like the best is one that guides you to sew the ends together before you cut them off. When you're first learning how to do this, it's a little bit risky to cut the ends off before you do the sewing.

So I really like this method because it guides you to sew first and then cut. And lemme show you how that's done. You wanna, first of all, when you sew the binding strips on, leave yourself a little bit of room to work. You're gonna need about seven inches I find is about the right amount of space here. So you stop sewing and leave about seven inches of space.

Then it helps if you can get your quilt flat on a table to do this next step. And you, at this point, you'll be sewing the ends together with a diagonal seam. But at this point, you just wanna bring them together in a straight line, just like so. So you see the ends here, you wanna fold them back so they just meet and then you wanna take a nice sharp scissors and you're gonna make a little snip right here. And the snips should be about an eighth to a quarter of an inch in.

Not too much but enough that you can find it again. So this is the trickiest part here. You're gonna unfold each of the binding end. And remember that this one goes over and this one comes towards you just like so. And I'll show you that again.

You've got them like this. And because this is the trickiest part, you wanna be sure to get this in your mind. This one unfolds and goes over to my right and this one comes toward myself. And then you can see I've got the little snips. I've got one here, see that little snip there.

And I've got one right here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna match those two snips up, just like so, right here. And this is where you can see why you need that seven inches of space room to work. And it looks like I didn't allow quite enough space which seems to happen pretty often. But if I feel like I don't have quite enough space, I'll take my scissors and just nip a few of the stitches back here so that I have a little bit more room to work.

'Cause this is really difficult if you don't give yourself enough space. So I gave myself about an extra inch there, that's gonna be better. So, I've notched my strips up. And then what you wanna do is kind of pull this away from the quilt. And I'm going to get a couple of pins and I'm gonna sew from here across.

I wanna make sure I get this completely unfolded. Matching my little snips. So a couple of pins here are helpful. Get this all flattened out. Make sure you have the bottom one nice and flat.

And you can use a ruler here to make sure that your angle is straight. I've gotten to where I can just eyeball it so if you do this a couple of times you'll probably be okay just eyeballing this corner angle right here. And sometimes another pin is helpful. So I'm all ready to sew. I wanna pull the quilt away a little bit, make sure I have the bottom one unfolded.

I have everything pinned and I'm gonna take this to my sewing machine. So I will sew. Remember this one came over to my right and this one came down towards myself. And I matched up my little snips and I sewed across from here all the way down to here. So now that I've made the seam, I can actually check to be sure that I've got it fitting correctly.

So I lay it like so on the quilt and check, did I do this correctly? And I can see that, yes I did, it's going to fit. Now I can trim off these ends. Just go right ahead and trim those off. And then I would take this to the like ironing board and give it a good press.

All way, nice and flat just like so. Take it to my sewing machine and I'll finish up that seven inches that I left open. I'll finish up sewing a binding to the quilt. And then you can see that I'm ready to finish up the binding process and bring this around here and secure it either by hand or machine depending on what kind of a binding technique I'm using. So that's an easy way to join those binding ends.

Doing the sewing before you do the cutting so you make sure that you've got it right where you want to before you go ahead.