Finish It Up Friday + Binding Tutorial

Happy Friday Everybody!  Today I wanted to show you the finished quilt from last week's "Life's A Charm" series.  You can click here to read more.

I did an easy all over block design on this quilt which was a lot of fun, it was a new design for me and it doesn't take away from the busyness of the quilt.  However, for the binding I wanted to try a new technique I learned a couple of weeks ago and thought I'd pass the tutorial on to all of you.  I learned about this a few weeks ago at a machine quilting guild I belong to.  With this technique, you put the entire binding on by machine.  While I'm sure many of you know about this, for those of you who don't I hope this helps a bit.

First, make your binding the way you normally would.  Mine is 2 1/2" wide and I fold it in half and then press.  A little trick is to use an old coffee can and put it in while you're ironing, that way it doesn't fall all over the floor and you can just pull it out easily as you're stitching it down.  This has been a lifesaver for me.

Once your binding is prepared, attach your binding like you normally would with the raw edge of the binding matched to the raw edge of the quilt, but make sure you sew it to the back of the quilt.

Then ... you need to cut off the excess at the beginning and end of your binding on the diagonal and do the final sew down.

A tip of mine is to take a picture of positioning the ends correctly, taking a picture, printing it and keeping it at my sewing machine.  This way, when it's time to do this, you have an easy reference.  I was always getting mixed up and ended up twisting all my ends every which way.  Now I have a nice visual to clue me in ... no more frustrations!

Finally, pull the front of your binding around to the front (make sure your top thread matches your binding!) and stitch down with the blind stitch.

This was the first time I've tried it myself and it went pretty smoothly with the exception that my machine doesn't allow a stitch to have a mirror image.  So when I used the blind hem stitch I had to push the whole body of my quilt into the machine so the stitch was facing the right way.

Special shout out of thanks to the linky parties today: Finish It Up Friday; Can I Get a Whoop Whoop?; Thank Goodness it's Finished Friday.

Have a Wonderful Weekend!

Megan