Prequilted Fabric Session 4: Continuous Bias Binding

When we made the straight grain binding strips, we made strips. It's exactly what it implies. And we cut across the crosswise grain of the fabric and then joined those strips together. For bias binding, we need to cut on the bias. We need to cut 45 degrees.

You have two options. You can go ahead and cut a square, which is the easiest way to find the bias because it is 45 degrees. It's the old hypotenuse of triangles that we had back in high school geometry. And from there, you can continue cutting individual small strips, that you will then have to piece one at a time. That's very slow and tedious, and not always the most accurate way to do it.

I'm going to show you a method to make continuous bias binding. You will have one long strip of binding when we finish. And I think you'll be quite surprised from this square, how much binding we actually can get. So the first thing is to cut a square, and how big a square depends on how many inches of binding you need. And that will all be contained in the PDF that you can download.

Let's just let it suffice for now that we have cut a square, and I believe this one is 17 inches square. Doesn't matter, could be 12, could be 16. Cut the square. Then cut diagonally across the bias, so you have two individual triangles. Rotate until the short sides are on the outside of where a square would have been, and then take the other one and rotate it, so it is in the opposite direction.

It will look something like this. I call it table legs. It looks like the legs of a table, is what you're after. You will have what we fondly refer to as ears on the end. They will stick over.

These points will not match up. That's exactly what you want. And they should be in the neighborhood of about a quarter of an inch overhang. If it's a little more, a little less, it's not the end of the world, but try and have it as close to a quarter of an inch as you can. And sometimes we can just kind of work that back in.

Sometimes it's just a matter of how the fabric is laying on the table. Go ahead and pin if you like. I always at least pin the corners and usually the center. And now we are going to make a quarter inch seam. Now, I am a firm believer in not sewing over pins, so I will advise you to remove the pins before you come to them.

Remove the pins, because if you sow over them, not only can you break a needle, you can also cause your machine to go out of time. You can also create costly repairs and downtime, and none of us likes to be kept away from our quiltings. So keep your machine in top working order, and don't sew over pins. All right. We're going to press that seam open.

I like to use steam. I find it sets seams and they stay open much better, or to one side more so, than if I just press them without steam. It's quilters preference though. There are arguments for, and against using steam. All right, when you finish, you will have something that looks like a parallelogram.

That's another one of those geometry terms we learned many years ago. But it's the rectangle with the slanted sides, all right. And you want to put it just like that, so that the seam is going across the piece. You're going to take your ruler and your marking instrument of choice. I'm going to make this as two inches, just because that is my favorite width of binding to use.

And you're just going to come right along and mark all the way across your parallelogram. Be very accurate with your markings. This is not the time to get in a hurry, this is a critical point. The other critical point is that you need to mark the entire parallelogram. The marker that I'm using is by Clover, no sponsorship or anything.

It's just a marker that I happen to like. I love that it's chalk, that it's contained within a container. It moves via a wheel and dispenses, whoops, dispenses the chalk. And more importantly, it gives a very fine line that you can follow, and it doesn't rub off immediately. It will rub off, but it will stay usually enough until I can do what sewing that I need.

And so far, I found it in pink, white, or rather blue, white, and yellow, and I've been very happy with it. All right, so I have my markings on here. Now comes the tricky part. You're gonna get your pins, and you are going to pin the two short sides together. But you aren't going to match your lines like that.

That just won't work. First of all, you're having to make a tube, so it's not easy to get it to cooperate some times. And we are going to start, I like to start down where the excess is. You're going to offset it by one. So, I have a line here.

I'm skipping that line and going to the next one. When you get ready to pin, come in approximately a quarter of an inch and match up the other side. And I got lucky, this time it matched right away. Go ahead and pin it like that. Now, you're going to work down that row.

You may have to futz with it a little bit to get it to line up right. As you can see there, it was off just a little bit. It is so critical to get those pin marks, or the pin to line up on the line. So, you just play with it until you get it there. And then we have our very last line, which is not going to match up.

So we're just gonna pin it like that. All right, what you have now is a distorted tube, if you will. And as you lay it down, you can see that the lines are indeed continuous. But, we're not done yet. Now, we're going to come over to the machine.

Whoops, I'm not liking how that is. And, you're going to stitch the same with a quarter of an inch seam, again, making sure you remove the pins. Continuous line binding, or continuous bias binding rather, is used for anywhere that you have curves or very unusual angles. And the reason we want to use it, is we need the fabric or the binding to stretch to go around those curves and to ease its way in. You can use it on straight lines of quilts, but typically we don't.

We typically find that the cross grain or straight grain binding works just fine. Okay, so we've got our, whoops, we have our seam done. Now, of course, we need to press it. And don't skip steps when it comes to pressing. It's not okay.

There's many good reasons for pressing. Number one, and most important is I had a home economics teacher beat into my head when I did not want to listen, is that pressing makes whatever you're making more professional. Your seams will lay flatter. You will just have a more tailored look. It is a critical part of sewing and quilting.

All right, now we're going to grab a good pair of shears and we're going to start cutting on the line. You want a pair of shears that's going to give you a nice clean cut. This is probably the most tedious part of the whole process, but if you compare it to piecing a ton of little pieces to make binding, and then having to deal with all of those seams, when you're actually in the binding process and hoping that they won't land in a corner as part of a miter, I think you'll see that this is a much easier way to do it. And I think you can see how our persistence with the pins paid off, because all of our lines are matching up nice and neatly here, going across that seam. The value of a good pair of shears cannot be overstated.

When I first learned to sew, I was blessed with parents who really supported my endeavors. My mother was quite a sewer, and they were both Depression-era kids. In high school, they were caught by the Depression, so there wasn't a lot of frivolousness or waste in our house, nor was there excess in the fact that you bought things that met your need, but you didn't necessarily have to have the best of everything. So one year for my birthday, my father on his own, no less, went out and bought me a pair of Gingher shears. I was blown away, because especially at that time, Gingher was the standard for shears, and still holds a very high standard in the world today.

And he took them in, he was a machinist, he took them into where he worked, and had one of the guys stamp my name onto the shears, so they would never get lost. Those sheers followed me all around the world, when I was in the Air Force, and sadly, they got lost during one of my moves. And it was several years later, before I was able to replace them with this pair. But every time I use these scissors, or whenever I see Gingher shears, I must admit, I think of my dad and his generosity in buying me the best set of scissors that he could at that time. And having good quality equipment makes a huge difference in the results of the work.

So always buy, not necessarily the most expensive, but the best that you can afford, and do your research into what constitutes good quality equipment. You will never regret it, and it will save you a lot of frustration. So with my little story telling there, we are almost done with this tedious job of cutting, and we are almost done with our binding, believe it or not. We just have one last step to go, and it will be finished. Okay, we came to the end of the line.

You're probably gonna have a little dog ear there. Just go ahead and clip the ear off, so you have a nice straight line for your binding. Check the other end. Make sure, yep, see it's got a little dog ear too. Go ahead and just eyeball that off.

All right. Last step, you want to see where the seams are. Turn it to the right side, come over to the ironing board. And once again, we're going to press it in half, just like we did our binding before. Now, be very careful as you're working with it, because it will stretch and you can distort these edges, and then you will have a wavy binding that there's no recuperating from.

So handle it with care. And there, we're at the end of our long binding tail, and that's how you make continuous bias binding. And in a few more segments, we're gonna show you how to use this on your quilt.