(all these photos should be clickable to enlarge them to full screen)
This is just my normal way of binding, though it could have been redone as it's a little wobbly but this silk frays so much that I'm not going to even risk undoing it and restitching.
And I hem down by hand on the back.
For my talk I thought it might be nice to hand my sample pieces round the room so people can follow the lines with their fingers. So I've done some quickie bindings on them. This one, I stitched down by machine on the front, then folded it over and stitched over the back with a fancy machine stitch. If I were doing it again I'd pin it down so it would be a little more even.
In the last copy of the AQS magazine I received someone wrote about facing a quilt. I couldn't follow their directions. Then
Fibremania put yet another facing method on her blog, but at that involved using 4 pieces of binding, it wasn't what I had in mind.
I cut out a rectangle of facing fabric the same size as this little quilt and cut out a smaller rectangle about an inch in out of the middle of this piece.
I stitched it to the front of the little quilt 1/4 from the edge. I then turned it inside out, first clipping the corners.
I used an orange stick to get the corners nicely 'fitted'. I stitched round by hand about a 1/4" in from the edge but only going through the quilt backing fabric (pink).
And now I'm in the process of hemming it down. It would have looked better if I'd used the pink fabric for the facing.
This is my normal binding except normally I hide the stitching on the mitre, just inside the overlap. I actually feeling they don't need stitching down at all but my first entry into the festival of quilts this was picked up so I developed a way of stitching the mitre which didn't show. Then last year I was still picked up for not stitching them down, so the answer must be to make them show (or not enter the FOQ).
So this is how I plan to stitch them from now on.
This last one was another quickie way on a stitching sample. Stitched it by machine on the front.
Folded it over and just stitched the front down. I should have taken a photo of the corner as I avoided the mitre problem totally by curving the corners.
I add the binding with my walking foot. I move the needle to the extreme right and then make myself a little paper template. I stitch it in two directions to the corner so I have a template of where to stop before I fold the binding over to go round the corner.
When I'm making a sleeve, I cut the fabric at 9" (I know 8½" would be enough but who ever heard of a quilting being rejected for the sleeve being a little large?) I lay it at the top of the quilt and cut each end just off the edges of the quilt. Why use a tape measure when you need it just short of this measurement.
I then fold the ends over to the wrong side twice and because the walking foot is still in the machine, it's quite nice to use the edge of that slit up to the needle as a guide so the stitching is close to the edge of the fold.
