Beginner Quilting Session 9: How to Bind a Quilt

Once you finish quilting your quilt, now we need to trim our edges so we can bind it. So again, remember we had all of our layers a little bit bigger than the next. So now we can come back with our ruler and our rotary cutter, and we can trim everything to be the size of our finished quilt top. Just going right along, trimming this up Move my quilt, make it a little bit easier to work with, and just trimming along all of our sides. And getting everything nice and square and ready to put a binding on. And you can see in my sample, I did not quilt the entire thing. We just did a little bit of practice work, but you would have your sample entirely quilted before you move on to binding. So we have all of that cut off, and now we're ready to put on a binding. Now you can go and you can buy already made binding. You can buy already cut strips, or you can make your own. I like to make my own, because I like to really find a fabric that I think matches well or contrasts well with everything that I've made my quilt out of. In this case, I've chosen a rather lime green. I chose this because I have green in my polka dots on my yellow fabric, and I have this almost lime-green yellow color in this fabric as well. So it's the one color that sort of ties everything together is our green. So that's what I've chosen to cut my strips out of to make my binding. Now you can change the size that you want your binding to be. You can have a really thick binding, or you could have a really thin binding. I like to start with 2 1/4 inch strips to create my binding. Now, in this case, I don't need a whole lot, because I don't have a very big square of quilts that I am binding. But if you're making a big King or Queen size quilt, you're probably going to have to cut some strips and then attach your strips together. Now, rather than just taking your two strips, lining them up right sides together and stitching them, we're actually gonna stitch our strips together at an angle, and this will help make everything a little bit more secure. So I've got a length of binding, I've already started putting everything together. And I have another little strip that I need to add. So what I'm gonna do, as you can see, I've already drawn a line here, this diagonal at 45 degrees from our right angle down here. I'm going to take this strip and I'm going to line it up right along that line. Actually, I'm gonna move it over. That's my stitching line. So I need to move it over. So I'm stitching right along that line there. And when I stitch there, you can see when I open this up, I'm going to have one continuous strip that goes along, and it'll be nice and secure. Now, if you're getting confused as to how you're supposed to line everything up, do what I just did there. Put it down, hold it with your fingers, and unfold it. If you've lined something up and you unfold it, and it doesn't go in one straight line, then you know you haven't lined everything up right. So I'm gonna lay my fabric right back down on that line, there. Put a couple pins in place to hold it, just because since we're not putting two of the exact pieces down. I'm kind of have them going at different angles. It's a little bit more difficult to just hold in place to stitch. Take this over to my machine and stitch our two pieces together. So I'm stitching from our upper corner. Oop, and you can see I'm not moving. So what I did not do is re-engage my feed dogs from when I was doing the free motion quilting. So in my case, my little switch is back behind the base of my machine. Yours might be in a different spot. So if you go to start doing your binding, and you're sewing, but your fabric isn't moving, check to make sure that you have reengaged those feed dogs. So I have that stitched. And I will even double-check one more time that when I unfold it everything lines up, like so, before I cut off this excess here in the back. Because if I need to maybe take out my stitching and readjust something, I wanna be able to do that before I've cut off my excess fabric in the back. Then, I am going to take this over and press it so I can press this seam allowance to one side. Just move this in slightly, and press my seam allowance to one side. In this case, I don't really care which side I am pressing it to. Just gonna go this way, because it is easiest. I then, as you can see, I've already started to do it in my binding I've already made. I'm folding it in half and pressing it. So I fold in half, lining up those raw edges, and I'm going to press. And I'm gonna continue doing that with this new little strip of binding that I've just added on. So again, I'm lining up the raw edges, and I just go a little bit at a time, 'cause I really wanna make sure that those edges are lining up. And it's kind of hard to hold everything in place, but you could hold a few inches of it, at least in place. Keep going. Couple more little presses, and then we should have more than enough binding to just show you a little part of our sample here on our quilt. Again, you would want to measure the entire perimeter of the quilt and make sure that you have made and pieced together enough binding before you actually start putting it onto your quilt. So here I have my little quilted section. I'm gonna start along this upper edge here along my quilt. So I'm gonna start somewhere in the middle. Now I don't want to start right off the bat the very edge of my binding. I wanna leave a few inches. I'm gonna use that for when I actually come back and put my binding in place. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start a few inches in and I'm just going to line the raw edges of my binding up with the raw edges of my quilt. Now I can either use these longer straight pins like this, or I can use these binder clips that I showed you earlier, that are one of those handy tools that you can use. And I just line everything up and put one of those binder clips in place. Go ahead and go a little further down and put another little clip in place. Now, what I like about these clips at the corners is because we are going to be mitering these corners, so it's a very nice looking corner when we get done. And these clips are about a 1/4 inch. They're a little, little bit more, but we need to stop about a 1/4 of an inch from the edge of our quilt in order to miter our edges. And so that's a nice little reminder to me, that you need to stop. So we're gonna start here at this pin. And we are going to use, I like to use a 1/4 inch seam allowance when I'm putting on my binding as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and put my 1/4 inch foot back on. Gonna have everything still lined up to do a straight stitch down the middle, so I don't have to worry about my needle hitting my presser foot. And I am just going to start stitching. So I have the edge of my quilt and my binding and everything lined up with the edge of my foot, and I'm just going to stitch. I get up near my binder clip, and I go ahead and take that off. Keep stitching, and I'm getting again, close to this binder clip, so I'm going to take it off. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to stitch up to about a 1/4 inch from the edge. If you wanted to measure and mark this, you can, or you can just eyeball it. I have my needle down. I'm actually going to raise my presser foot, pivot my quilt, so I'm then stitching directly off of my binding on my quilt at an angle, straight up to that corner. And this is just going to help me when it comes to mitering those corners. So I'm gonna take it off, and now we have to do some folding in order to get our next side to lay the way we want it to. So as you can see, my binding is going this way. I now need it to go back down towards me. So I'm gonna take, and I'm going to fold it up. And if you wanna use your cutting mat as a good guide, you can do that. You can see everything is now lined up right along this edge here, this line. And that's why stitching at this little 45 degree angle, right like I did there, helps me for when I pull this up, like so, that piece of binding already wants to go right up along this line. I can finger press a little to keep it in place. I'm going to fold it back down over itself, so that the new folded edge on my binding here is right in line with the raw edge of my quilt. And then I will continue lining up my raw edge right along here. Now, while I still have my fingers in place there. I do wanna go ahead and put a pin in place, 'cause I have all that folding I just did to make my nice mitered corner, and I don't want it to fall out right away. So now I'm going to continue lining my binding up along this edge, again, using either our pins. If you wanna use those binder clips, we can, and just continue down this side. So let's go a little ways down this side and we'll come back and we'll look at how well that mitered corner came together. So we stopped a 1/4 of an inch from the edge coming to this corner, and I'm going to start a 1/4 inch from the edge on this corner. Again, that's something you can measure and mark, or you can eyeball it, because you know it should be right in line with this line of stitching going across, is right where you should be starting. So again, I am just going to stitch a 1/4 inch from the edge. Go ahead and take my pin out when I get to it, and continue stitching. If you find that you're having a hard time feeding all of your layers through, you can see I've reached through with my other hand and I am slightly pulling on the quilt, not a whole lot. I don't wanna really tug it through there, but I'm just helping give it a little bit of help going through there. You can also put a walking foot on your machine, if you find that you're really having trouble sewing through all those layers. You just will have to adjust how you do your seam allowance on that, because you won't be able to use your 1/4 inch foot with your seam allowance. I'm just gonna take this off so we can take a quick look up at our corner. So, I have my pins out, and you can see we have our stitching, we've stopped there. So now when we open this up, we can see that once we actually start folding this to the wrong side, like so, we're going to have a nice, perfect mitered corner. And that came from the way that we folded our fabric. So what we would do now, is we would continue attaching our binding all the way around the outside edges. Again, doing all four of our corners, just like we did. And then we come back around, we're going to stop and we're gonna leave an open gap. And the reason we're gonna leave that gap is because we have to do something special in order to get our pieces of binding to match up perfectly. So I'm gonna take a quick break and grab my other sample that has a binding already done all the way around, and I'm gonna show you how to really finish everything up. So I have a sample here that I've done my binding all the way around the outside edge. And you can see, I have my opening here, where I have not attached my binding. And the reason I've left such a big opening is that I want to attach the edges of my binding first, and then lay them down on my quilt, so everything is nice and flat. So what I've done, is I've taken my piece and sort of opened it up, and I have cut it so they overlap by exactly 1/4 inch, because this is the seam allowance that I'm going to be using. So as you can see, I have them both cut to where if I open them up, they're both angled down. So this is the right side of my fabric, and it's angled down. This is the wrong side, and it's angled down. What I need to do is layer these two pieces, right sides together like this, and I'm going to pin them and then stitch them using a 1/4 inch seam allowance. So now, the bigger the opening you leave to do this, a little bit easier it is to do. So you can see I'm really having to pull up on my quilt. So if you find that it's giving you any kind of problems at all, you can actually sort of fold, maneuver your quilt, put one of your binding clips on there to hold it. That way you don't have as much pull against the fabric that you're going to try and stitch. So again, I have these lined up, and I'm just going to stitch right across there with my 1/4 inch seam allowance. Again, so I have my 1/4 inch foot on. It's nice and easy to do, just like that. Take it off. And now I'm ready to finish up this binding on my quilt. So you can see, as soon as I stitch those together, as soon as I let the quilt out and lay everything flat, I have just enough binding to make everything lay nice and flat along my edge. So I'm just going to finger press our seam allowance in one direction. I already have the fold. I can continue on from before, and now I can just put a couple pins right along here and just close up this last little gap that I have in my binding. And I'll go ahead and do that now. Put this right along the edge, stitching over where I stopped from before. And then all the way across that opening. And then I will just overlap where I had stitching before. That way, I don't have to worry about doing any back stitching or everything. It'll be nice and secured in place. And I have a binding that perfectly fits my quilt. Now, what you would do is you would take and you would fold your binding to the wrong side. So I'm going to flip it over. I have my right side. You can see I have my backing fabric. There's all the quilting I've done. What I wanna do is I want to fold this binding over just like so. Then again, I can put some pins in place if I wanna use pins, or again, I can fold it over and I can put those binder clips. And that's all I'm gonna do, all the way around, because I'm going to fold my binding over to the wrong side. Put one of those binder clips on like that. When we get to the corners, we just wanna make sure that this nice mitered corner we made continues to stay at that nice 45 degree angle, just like that. So I like to sort of fold those from the right side, because I'm more worried about what they're gonna look like on the right side than I am the wrong side. You can then come to the back, keeping everything held in place. If you drop it a little bit, you can adjust and then put a pin in. And then I'll probably go back to the right side, make sure everything's still looks good on the right side. And then I'm happy with how that's pinned there. And I can continue on with folding my binding to the wrong side and putting in pins. Now this is a personal preference on how you want to finish the final step of your quilt. If you're just ready to be done, and you really want this to be on the bed or hanging on the wall, you can take this back over to your machine and you can machine stitch your binding all the way around the outside edge. That will leave a layer of stitching on this side, unless you stitch from the right side and you stitch in the ditch. But then again, you'll have a layer of stitching that you can see on this side. At this point, what I like to do, is I've already put a lot of time into my quilt and I really want it to look nice and finished even on the wrong side, that I'll actually take the time to hand stitch my binding in place. So I would just take a hand sewing needle and thread and I would stitch the binding to just this backing layer of fabric. So I would take my needle. Let's use a pin for an example here. And I'm only going to go through this backing fabric, just in small little bites like that. So if I turn this over, I can see my pin or my needle would not go all the way through to the right side. And I would never see that. So if you really want a nice finished look on the back of your quilt, you can get that hand sewing needle. Just sit down in front of the TV, watch a movie or something, and you can hand stitch your binding in place. And then you'd have a nice, perfectly finished quilt. So I really hope you will give some of these blocks a try, really try out some of these techniques, and make a little quilt sample, and then expand on that. And make as many quilts as you can make.