ZJ Humbach

Prequilted Fabric Session 3: Straight Grain Binding

ZJ Humbach
Duration:   10  mins

Description

Straight-Grain Binding is a vital component for finishing many projects made with pre-quilted fabric. ZJ takes you through the process from start to finish. You’ll learn how to measure your project so you know how much straight grain binding to prepare, and then learn an easy way to make it. This video teaches you when it’s appropriate to use this type of binding, and more importantly, when not to use it.

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Straight grain binding is the most common binding that you're going to find in quilting. There's several reasons for it. First of all, it's quick and easy to make. Second of all, it's fairly inexpensive. Typically the binding is cut across the fabric on the cross grain of the quilt, but it is still considered a straight grain, because the fabric pulls straight, and does not distort.

On cross grain, I get a little bit of distortion, but not much, it still stays in a straight line. On straight of grain, or lengthwise grain, it goes parallel with the selvage, and does not stretch at all or very, very little. The cross grain or bias binding is the 45 degree angle across the fabric. And as you can see, that stretches greatly, and it distorts, it does not keep a straight line. It is going across the lines.

The direction of the binding is very important, depending on the type of quilt that you're binding, and we're going to discuss that more at length, especially in the next segment. Whenever you can, I tell clients to please use the lengthwise grain for their binding, because it does have less stretch if the quilt is square. It also gives you a continuous run. You aren't having to piece it, but typically we do see the method that I'm going to show you. Most binding is cut from crosswise strips.

A width of fabric is typically 44 inches, but we count on after you preshrink, possibly 40 to 42 inches of usable fabric at the most. At most quilting magazines such as Quilters Newsletters, McCall's, and some of the other popular magazines, they do all of their calculations based on 40 inches. That's important to remember. So what you're going to do is you are going to cut binding strips, and you always want to square up that first cut, so you have a nice clean edge. And then you're going to come over, and cut the width of binding that you want in strips going across the grain.

Typically most quilting magazines in the past have been recommending a two and a half inch binding. That does tend to leave a little bit of slop. Recently I've noticed a trend where they're moving more to two and a quarter inch bindings. A lot of times, depending on the thickness of the batting, I will actually use a two inch binding, because I can pack it tighter, and have a very nice, tight, neat binding. And that actually prevents wear and tear on the binding edge.

It's when it's loosened sloppy, and it's not packed with the batting that you will see more wear, and tend to see holes along the edge of the binding. But for right now we're going to go with two and a quarter inches. So I am going to come across and measure one, two, and a quarter inch, and cut my strip. All right. And I want to make sure I don't slip.

I want this to be very even. All right, there's one. And, oops, it's time for a new blade. All right. And then I'm going to come across two and a quarter more.

So now I should be at two and a half. So I've got one, I've got two, and I've got a quarter. And that's right where I want to be. So I'm just going to cut two strips. That's what I'm going to need for the placemat project.

And the way we determine how many strips of binding you need, and how much binding you have to buy is you add up all the sides of the quilt. And then after you've added those all together, so you have four measurements, you're going to add 10 inches for turning the corners and for making the tails. And so you can take, for instance, in this case, I needed two strips at 40 inches, and they were at two and a quarter. So that's four and a half inches. And that would be approximately, if I remember my math correctly, an eighth of a yard.

I'd buy a quarter just to make sure, because sometimes fabric doesn't get cut exactly straight, and you want a little bit of fudge factor, but it doesn't take a lot to bind a quilt. Most lap to double size quilts, you can usually get away with about three eights to a half a yard of fabric. So it doesn't take a lot for binding. And now that we have our pieces cut, the first thing you want to do is trim off the selvages. The reason you trim off the selvages is number one, there are two reasons.

Number one is the salvage is woven tighter than the rest of the fabric. And so it could distort your binding. More importantly, there's usually writing in the selvage, or as you can see, it's a different color than the fabric. And you certainly don't want that showing through in your binding. So go ahead and cut off those inches, or those ends right from the get go.

All right, once you have your binding strips cut, you need to lay them perpendicular to each other. All right, and I like to overlap mine by a quarter of an inch either way. By overlapping, I make sure that after my strip is sewn, and I turn it back, it will be one nice straight line. If you've ever done a binding, and it's been off just a little bit, kind of like a stagger. That's why.

Now most times I just take this over to the machine, and lay these on, and sew it as I go, because I've been doing this for just probably too many years now, but if you want, you have two options. One is to pin. The other is you can put your ruler from this point to this point inside the little corner there, and draw a line that you can stitch on. I find for the most part, while I tend to be pretty anal about accuracy, I find that on a binding, I can usually eyeball it close enough that I've never ever had a problem with it. Unless you're getting a real banana with a curve, most people can sew a straight line for about two inches, and you'll be just fine.

So let's go ahead and sew that, and put this binding together. Oops. All right. So I'm going to sew from corner to corner. If you want to back tack, that's fine.

I'm usually in too much of a hurry, and I have never really had a problem with it coming out. So I sew from one corner to the next, sewing completely off. Get a pair of scissors. Trim that up. You're going to come over here with your ruler.

You're going to lay it along the seam line that you just sewed. I should probably use a smaller ruler, would actually be easier. But go ahead and line up your line there, boy, dead on. Got to love that. Grab your rotary cutter.

Make sure the quarter inch mark is on the stitching line. Cut to the right of it, so there is a quarter of an inch seam allowance. You're going to notice those two little dog ears, gently trim those off. And when you do, you will find that you now have a continuous line of fabric. We're going to go ahead.

At this point, you want to press those seams open. The reason you press the seam open instead of pressing it to the side is to eliminate the bulk. And you'll see that in just a second when we iron the whole length of fabric. After you press all the seams open, 'cause most times you'll have more than two strips sewed together. You turn the fabric back towards you, and you are going to press it in half.

This is going to make what we call a double fold, or French fold binding. It's a double fold, because when you sew it onto your quilt, you're actually having two layers of fabric on either side of the quilt, rather than just a single piece of fabric. So it will wear twice as long, and be much, much stronger. Okay, we're going to go ahead, and just very quickly press this out. Now you can see when you come to the seam, and I turn this over, you'll have half of the seam going in that direction, and half of it will come in this direction.

So now you have eliminated the bulk, and made that binding a little bit thinner, and much easier to work with. If you were to have left the seam pressed to one side, you would have one, two, three, four layers of fabric minimum making a nice bump in the middle of your binding. So that's all there is to it. At that point in time, you have a nice piece of straight line binding to work with. And that's how you make straight grain binding.

Next we're going to look at how to make continuous bias binding.

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