Binding the Edges by Hand
Your quilting is done. All those stitches holding your layers together, knots buried, threads clipped. Now you've got raw edges all the way around and a project that isn't a quilt yet. It's a quilt with fringe potential. Binding finishes it off and gives you something you can put on a bed or a couch without it fraying apart in the wash.
Here's the order: cut your strips, join them into one long piece, attach it to the front by machine or by hand (your call — I'll explain the tradeoff), fold it to the back, and stitch it down by hand. That last part is the slow part. It's also the part that makes it look like you knew what you were doing.
Cutting your binding strips
Cut strips 2 1/2 inches wide, across the width of your fabric. For a table runner or small lap quilt you'll need somewhere around 4 to 6 strips depending on the perimeter. Measure the outside edge of your quilt, add about 10 inches for seams and turning corners, and cut enough strips to get there.
Cut these strips on the straight grain, not the bias — unless your quilt has curved edges, which yours doesn't, because we don't do curves in this class. I don't do curves in any class. Drunkard's path and all that is a gap for me too.
Grain matters more than people think when they're new. My very first block ever, I cut every square off-grain because nobody told me grain was a thing you had to watch, and the whole block bowed like a potato chip the second I pressed it. I ironed that thing maybe forty times trying to flatten it before I admitted it was cooked and cut a new one. Binding strips cut off-grain do the same to your edge — wavy, won't lay flat, fights you the whole way around. Check your fold lines. Not sure? Ask me before you cut, not after.
Joining the strips
Lay two strips right sides together at a right angle, like a plus-sign corner, and sew diagonally corner to corner. Trim the seam allowance to about 1/4 inch and press it open. Do this for all your strips until you've got one long strip. The diagonal seam spreads the bulk out so you don't get a lump when it's folded and sewn into the quilt.
Press the whole strip in half lengthwise, wrong sides together, raw edges together on one side. That's your binding.
Attaching it
Starting a few inches from a corner, sew the raw edge of your binding to the raw edge of the quilt top, right sides together, using about a 1/4 inch seam. Machine is fine here. I've told you I can't get machine tension right to save my life — true for quilting stitches, but a straight seam attaching binding is different. It's just a seam. If your machine behaves, use it. Saves time, and nobody sees this seam once it's folded over.
At each corner, stop 1/4 inch from the edge, backstitch, fold the binding up at a 45 degree angle, then fold it back down along the next side and keep sewing. That fold gives you a mitered corner. Don't overthink it. It's a fold, not a knot.
When you get back to where you started, leave yourself enough tail to join the two ends the same diagonal way you joined your strips earlier, then finish sewing it down.
Folding it to the back and hand stitching
This part takes the time. Fold the binding over the raw edge to the back of the quilt so it just covers your machine-stitched line. Pin it as you go, a few inches ahead of where you're working, not the whole thing at once.
Using your size 9 between and a matching or close-enough thread, stitch the folded edge down by hand with a small blind stitch or slip stitch — catch a couple threads of the backing, then a couple threads of the binding fold, pulling the stitches snug but not tight enough to pucker. Same rhythm as your quilting stitch, just a different job.
At the corners, fold the miter down flat and take a couple extra stitches right through the fold to hold it. Nobody's four-seam-intersection perfect at this, me included — I still can't get mine to line up crisp every time. Don't burn twenty minutes fussing over one corner. Get it close, tack it down, move on.
This hand-stitching step is slower than a machine binding. I won't pretend it isn't. But it's the same deal as the quilting — you do it in two-minute chunks on the couch, needle down when someone needs you, needle back up five minutes later. That's the whole reason I do any of this by hand.
Before next time
Bring your basted, quilted project and enough binding strips cut and pressed to go all the way around, plus a few extra inches. We'll join them and get the first side attached together in class.