Sewing on Binding

One of my favourite things to finally get to do is the binding on a quilt. I love to sit and handstitch the binding to the back of the quilt -- as you stitch along the quilt is just completely finishes the quilts which up until that point still doesn't look right - no matter the amount of quilting on the front. But I hated sewing the binding on the quilt -- esp. that last bit when you had to bring the two ends of the binding together. I have read so many different methods -- some of them as many as two typed pages with diagrams - such complicated instructions. Folding ends back, drawing lines, making spaces in between the ends of a certain width. Too complicated for someone like me who is a bit spacially challenged. Quite often I would just fold the one end inside the other which I had fold at a strange angle.

At the last Spring Retreat I went to I was bemoaning this problem and a fellow quilter announced she had a simple method and she would show it to me when the time came to finish off the binding. Good heaven's -- it was so simple and easy - why do they have such complicated methods for doing something so simple.

So here are the simple instructions for joining the two ends of the binding.

Leave a fairly long tail on each end so they are easy to work with -- 10-12 inches.
Overlap the tails the exact width of the binding. This binding is 2 1/4 inches wide so I overlapped 2 1/4 inches. As you can see in this photo - I just moved the top piece off the fabric for a better view. The binding piece will lay flat on the fabric with only the 2 1/4 overlap.



Then put the right sides together just like you do when you sew the binding strips together to make the long lengths of binding to sew onto the quilt. Then put a pin in the strips -- in the direction you are going to sew and just check before you sew that you are going in the right direction.