Binding — Where do you start? {A Tutorial}

I’ve been doing a fair amount of bind­ing lately and thought I’d share a little trick I use to make bind­ing much easi­er.   It’s some­thing I worked out a while ago and makes sure you always have lovely flat bind­ing when you fin­ish off.    You can prob­ably tell from the title of this post that the trick is all about where you start the binding!

Just a quick dis­claim­er, you prob­ably won’t love this trick if you are really com­mit­ted to join­ing your bind­ing strips on the diag­on­al.    I join my bind­ing strips end to end using a ¹⁄₄″ seam and then press the seams open.  I’ve nev­er had any prob­lems with that meth­od and some of my quilts are get­ting on a bit now but if it’s not for you that’s OK.  There are plenty of ways to bind and some great tutori­als out there too.

So here we go…

1.   Grab you fin­ished quilt and lay in on a cut­ting board.   Find a seam in the quilt that is some­where in the middle of one side and then line that seam up really well with one of the inch marks on the cut­ting mat. 

2.    Pop your bind­ing on the quilt top.  The unfin­ished edge of the bind­ing strip needs to be aligned with the edge of the quilt.   Pin the bind­ing in place exactly ¹⁄₂″ past the seam line you just lined up on that inch mark.   That’s the trick!   By tak­ing the time to line up in step 1 and 2  you will have a pre­cise price to cut the bind­ing when you’re fin­ished sew­ing it on (in line with that seam of the quilt).  You’ll have a per­fect ¹⁄₄″ seam and, most import­antly, no lumps or bumps in your binding!

If you’re com­fort­able with bind­ing you can head over to you machine and fin­ish off.  If not, the next few steps will show you how to sew your bind­ing on and mitre the corners.

3.    Leave at least 8 inches and start sew­ing the bind­ing down using a ¹⁄₄″ seam allow­ance.   Stop ¹⁄₄″ from the first corner and back stitch a little.

4.    Take the quilt and bind­ing out of your machine.   You don’t need to snip any threads at this point, just man­oeuvre it enough to flip the bind­ing strip away from the quilt.   It should have a nice 45 degree angle as shown here.

5.    Fold the bind­ing back down on top of itself and pin in place.   You don’t tech­nic­ally need the pin but I find it keeps the corners nice and neat if I do.   Start sew­ing, again with a ¹⁄₄ seam allow­ance, from the top corner of the quilt.   Con­tin­ue sew­ing around the quilt until you have all four corners done.

6.    Stop sew­ing and back stitch at least 4 inches from the point you star­ted sew­ing the bind­ing down.   You’ll have two tails left loose which you’ll need in step 9.

7.    Lay the bind­ing over itself and hold or pin in place.   Make sure it’s neatly aligned on both edges.

8.    Here’s where lin­ing up the quilt at the start really pays off.   Grab a pair of scis­sors and slip them care­fully into the middle of the bind­ing.  IMPORTANT: Make sure that you don’t end up with the bot­tom bind­ing strip in the scis­sors, you only want to cut the top bind­ing strip.   Line the scis­sors up with the seam you ini­tially lined up on your cut­ting mat and cut.  You’ll be left with an over­lap of exactly ¹⁄₂ and inch.

9.    Open up the bind­ing and pin the two ends togeth­er and then sew a ¹⁄₄″ seam allow­ance to join.

10.    Fin­ger press the seams open.

11.    Close the bind­ing up again.  It will lay nice and flat on the quilt and then sew down the remainder of the bind­ing remem­ber­ing to back stitch a little at the start and end of the stitch­ing line.

12.    Hand or machine sew the back of your bind­ing down and you’re all fin­ished.   Per­fect flat bind­ing every time and all it takes is mak­ing sure you start in the right place.

Happy quilt­ing!