Quilt binding is the finishing touch to your quilt. Once your quilt top is pieced and quilted it's ready for you to sew on a binding... or is it? Here are a few steps you'll want to take to successfully bind your quilt.
Trimming Borders after Quilting
When you're finished quilting you should even up your quilt edges, as borders can stretch quite badly during the quilting process.
Use your long 6½” ruler, lay the edge of ruler in the last seam line and find a measurement you desire to use and mark with marking pencil on outside edge of your quilt. We recommend the Karisma pencil for marking as it glides smoothly on fabric. Trim back to this pencil line.
Measuring Your Quilt
Using a tape measure, measure the length of your quilt in three places – centre, left side and right side. Make a note of these measurements.
Let's pretend we measure a quilt and what we have is: Left = 68 ½”, Centre = 67 ¾” and Right = 68 ¼”. Your binding for the quilt should be the same as the smallest measurement. So you now know you need to make your left and right hand borders 67¾” long.
Next measure the width of your quilt in the same way and write the measurements down. Our pretend quilt has these measurements: Top = 43 ½”, Centre = 43” and Bottom = 44”. This means the binding for the top and bottom needs to be made 43” long.
Adjusting Border
Now that you know what size to make your binding you need to adjust your border. To do so find the half way and the quarter location of your quilt and mark with pins.
Using a sewing needle and thread, start from the middle. Wrap the thread around the centre pin in a figure 8. Now run a small gathering stitch to the next pin, unthread needle and re-thread. Wrap around next pin in figure 8 as before, repeat to end. Then repeat from centre out in the opposite direction.
You now use each of these threads to pull your border into the chosen measurement (67 ¾”), repeat on other side. Repeat on top and bottom until this measurement is 43”. When you pull up each section, wrap the thread around the pins in a figure 8, this will hold the threads very secure while you stitch the binding on.
Preparing the Binding
Cut your binding 2 ½” wide across the width of the fabric. The length you need is twice the length and twice the width of your quilt plus ten inches. The extra ten inches accomodates all the joins, and the start and finish.
For this example you would have:
67¾”+67¾”=135½” and 43+43”= 86” for a total of 221½”
Plus the additional 10" for a grand total of 231½” of fabric.
How much fabric do I need to buy?
We know we need to make our binding 231½” long. To calculate how much fabric you require, depends on the wide of the fabric. We'll use 42" for our calculation as it is a common width for quality quilt fabric.
Required length divided by width of fabric equals the number of strips you'll cut. For our example: 231 1/2"/ 42 = 6 strips
So we'll be cutting six strips 2 1/2 inches wide. There's just one more quick calculation to make. The number of your strips times the width of the strip.
6 x 2.5" = 15"
If your quilt shop sells fabric by the meterage you'll want to convert from inches to centimetres. You can use an online conversion tool to do the math for you or multiply by 2.54.
For our example we need 15" of fabric, which is equivalent to 38.1 cm. Therefore we'll purchase 40cm of fabric for our binding.
Making the Binding
Sew all your 2½” strips together into one continuous length, using a 45º angle join. Trim seams and press open. Fold one end of binding strip over at a 45º angle and fold and press the entire binding fabric in half down the length, wrong sides together.
Adding the Binding
On most quilts you'll stitch your binding to the top side of the quilt. Begin at the center of one edge of your quilt top. Place the binding so its raw edges meet the raw edges of the quilt.
Stitch through all layers using a ¼” seam. Stitch to a quarter inch from the corner and turn the corner. To do so leave the needle in the down position, lift the presser foot, rotate the quilt, lower the presser foot and backstitch ¼”, fold the binding back to the corner so that the folded edge is at the top and the raw edge lines up with the raw edge of the quilt. Repeat this process at each corner.
Turn your binding to the back of quilt and hand stitch using a blind hem stitch. Don’t forget to add a label to masterpiece.
