Making and Attaching Binding
Okay. You squared up your quilt, so now it's got clean edges instead of the ragged, quilted-past-the-line mess it was an hour ago. This is the lesson where we close it up for good. Binding is the last real skill in this whole process, and it's the part people rush because they're tired of the project by now. I get it. Try not to.
What binding actually is
Binding is the strip of fabric that wraps around the raw edges of your quilt and finishes them off. Top, batting, and backing all get sandwiched inside it. Without it you've got exposed batting and raw edges that'll fray the first time this thing hits a washing machine.
There are other ways to finish an edge. Some people do a knife edge, or bring the backing around to the front. Binding's the one I teach because it's the most forgiving and it holds up. If a corner's a little wonky, a good binding still reads as clean from three feet away, which is the distance most quilts get looked at from anyway.
Cutting your strips
For a quilt this size, cut strips 2.5 inches wide, selvage to selvage. You'll need enough total length to go around the whole perimeter plus about 10 inches extra for turning corners and joining the ends. Measure your quilt's perimeter, add that 10 inches, and divide by however wide your fabric is (usually around 40 inches after selvages are trimmed off) to get your number of strips.
Join the strips together at a 45-degree angle instead of straight across. It distributes the bulk of the seam so you don't get a hard lump when it hits the fold later. Press the seams open, then press the whole long strip in half lengthwise, wrong sides together. Now you've got one long doubled strip, right side out, ready to go.
Attaching it: the machine pass
Start on one side of the quilt, not right at a corner. Line up the raw edges of your binding strip with the raw edge of your quilt top, right sides together. Leave about a 6-inch tail unsewn at the start, you'll need it later to join the ends.
Sew with a quarter-inch seam, through all the layers, quilt top and binding both. Go slow here. This is a straight line of stitching but you're going through a lot of thickness, especially anywhere your quilting stitches cross the seam allowance.
Which brings me to something I learned the hard way. I once broke three needles in one evening trying to force a needle through a spot where seams were stacked up, back when I was still piecing mostly. I kept thinking if I just pushed a little harder it'd go through. It doesn't work that way. Now, anywhere the layers get thick, whether it's a seam intersection or a spot where your quilting stitches overlap heavy, I slow all the way down and turn the handwheel by hand to walk the needle through. Takes an extra ten seconds. Saves you a needle, and honestly saves your machine's timing too, which is a bigger repair than a needle.
Corners
When you get about a quarter inch from the corner, stop. Backstitch a couple stitches, then take the quilt off the machine. Fold the binding strip straight up, away from the quilt, making a 45-degree angle. Then fold it back down, so it's now lined up with the next edge you're about to sew, and the fold at the top creates a little pleat that'll become your miter.
Start sewing again from the top edge, quarter inch in, same seam allowance, down the next side. Repeat at each corner. This is the part that feels fiddly the first two or three times and then just becomes muscle memory.
Joining the ends
When you get back around to where you started, stop about 6 inches from your starting tail. Overlap the two ends and trim so you've got about 2.5 inches of overlap (matching your strip width). Open both ends up, put them right sides together at a right angle, and sew a diagonal seam, same as when you joined strips earlier. Check it lays flat before you trim the excess and finish sewing it down. This step trips people up more than any other part of binding, so if it takes you two tries, that's normal, not a sign you're bad at this.
Hand-stitching the back
Fold the binding around to the back of the quilt so it just covers your line of machine stitching, and pin or clip it in place a section at a time. Hand stitch it down with a blind stitch or ladder stitch, small and even, catching just the backing fabric and the fold of the binding, not going through to the front.
This part takes a while. An hour, maybe two, depending on the size of the quilt and how much TV you're willing to sit through. I do mine in the evening with something on in the background. There's no shortcut here that doesn't show on the front of the quilt, so I wouldn't rush it.
Finished beats perfect, and I mean that here as much as anywhere. If one corner's miter isn't razor sharp, that's fine. Nobody's going to run their fingers over every inch of this looking for the flaw. They're going to put it on a bed and use it.
Before next time
Get your binding strips cut and joined into one long piece if you can, so next time we're just sewing, not measuring. If you run out of evening, that's fine too, we'll pick up wherever you left off.