Piece Binding Strips

Honestly, to me, pinning and sewing all the binding strips together is my least favorite part of the whole binding process. It is necessary though so I always do it as the first step to get it out of the way early on.

Line up your strips right sides together so they make a 90 degree angle as in the picture above. (It might be hard to tell because the Liberty is such a saturated fabric but the horizontal top fabric here is wrong side up.)

Use a hera marker or piece of chalk draw a diagonal line from right to left across the intersection of the two strips. You will be sewing along this mark so make sure you can see it.

Pin the on either side of the mark and in the middle to hold it all in place for sewing.

Sew along the marked line. 

Cut off the excess on the right side of your seam, leave a 1/4-inch seam allowance.

Pull the top fabric open and press your seam to the side from the front.  It should look like the above photo.

Do this six more times until you have one really long binding strip.

Now you can move on to the fun part! 

Comments

[Rebecca]

So, you're not worried about cutting the strips on the bias? My life would be infinitely better if I could give that up.

[purl bee]

Dear Rebecca,
If you're binding something with a straight edge, rather than curved, its fine to cut the strips from selvage to selvage.

[Kim F.]

I know this is an older tutorial, but I just thought I'd mention that I was taught that you should always use bias strips for binding quilts, blankets, and the like. The reason is that fabric cut on the bias, since its threads are at a 45-degree angle to the very edge of the bound item, fray far more slowly than straight-cut bindings. You can often see on very old quilts if the maker used straight-cut strips that the binding is in shreds or in otherwise very bad shape. Those edges just wear so much faster than the rest of the quilt. A nitpicky point, I know, but if you have visions of your quilt or blanket becoming a family heirloom you'll probably want to bind it with bias-cut strips.