Finishing a Binding Strip on a Quilt

Finishing a Binding Strip on a Quilt
Hi! I am Shelly Cordsen at Expert Village.com and I am still sewing away. I am now doing the binding. I have come to the end where I want to come in and join them and I do not want to lay this in here, pull this over the top and just sew because you will have an opening here; you will have extra bulk that you do not need, so I am going to show you how to connect it as a bias strip. So I have this coming up to here with my tail and I have from here to here. I want some room to sew. So I am going to stop right there, just do a couple of back stitches and take it off the machine and I am going to spread out here. I am going to lay this out and I am going to bring this up to here and you can see where my fold is in that point. I am going to lie this over the top of it. Okay. So now that is over the top and you can see where that point is of that fold I have. I am going to go about 1/8th of an inch to the top and put a pin right in that fold. Now I am going to take that top layer and I am going to open it up like this. We are back to our number 7. We are going to take this, open it up and because you have ironed that, you have a crease this way and you can see where your center is. You want that center crease to land right there on top of that pin and here is our number 7 again, going this way and this way. I am going to take that pin and I am going to mark across here and another pin down here and now I am going to sew on and check your fabric here. We are going to come to that point and we are going to come right down to the center where you see that fold is and come out and that crease right there. Just kind of eyeball it and out of that crease take it out, remove my pin and there I am. You need to test this. You can see that fits just perfect right there. Open this up, take your handy dandy scissors and trim off about a quarter inch. You will need to open this up. Remember we want all our seams open, nice and flat, folded in half and then you’ll put that back on your machine and sew that down all the way and you have eliminated 99% of all bulk by doing a bias seam.