Binding Tutorial Part 3

1. Sew the binding on all four sides, until you get ALMOST back to where you started.
2. Leaving a few inches of space, take the begining and fold it straight out from the edge, leaving a triangle fold at the top edge. Keep everything on the machine so that you don't have to start and stop your threads.
3. Now take the end of the binding strip and cross over the triangle you formed from the begining edge.
4. After crossing over the begining of the binding, fold the top edge out, forming another triangle, but facing the other directions. the two triangles now form a little flying geese shape, pointing to the inside of the quilt.

5. Keeping your fingers there to hold everything in place, sew straight down through all the folded layers.

6. Trim the hanging tails off even with the raw edges of the binding.


7. Take the folded edge and fold it to the back of the quilt. Using a blind hem stitch, sew the binding down. The corners and the spot where you joined the begining and end will have little "pockets" from the multiple layers, you can put an extra stitch in each of these spots to hold all of the layers together and prevent shifting.

Binding Tutorial Part 2

After you have made yards and yards of binding, you are ready to put it on the quilt.

1. Leaving a few inches hanging loose, line up the raw edges of the binding and the quilt. I use a walking foot because it is usually on the machine at this point. It has an etched line to mark the quarter inch seam. Stitch down the edge, using a quarter inch seam ALMOST to the corner.
2. When you get within a quarter inch of the end of the side, stop and needle down. My walking foot has another etched line to mark the quarter inch spot from this direction, if yours doesn't, just eyeball it, a little more is better than a little less at this point.
4. With the needle down, pivot your quilt and sew diagonally off the corner of the quilt. Lift the presser foot, but don't cut the threads.
5. Rotate the quilt 45 degrees, so that the next side is ready to be sewn. Take the binding strip, and using the diagonal seam as a guide, pick up the binding and fold it away from you. Put your thumb on the bottom of the triangle to hold it in place. Notice everything is still attached to the machine. I hate to break the threads and would rather just keep going around and around.
6. Keeping that little triangle underneath, fold the binding strip straight back down so the raw edges line up on the side of the quilt you are ready to sew. Slide the quilt back under the foot and sew down the second side. You can peek underneath at this point and make sure you have a folded triangle under there, ready to form the corner.

Binding Tutorial Part 1

I've been doing bindings assembly line style lately on the nursing home quilts. After doing the same thing a few hundred times, I've streamlined things a bit. It's not that I'm trying to be lazy, just efficient. So here is how I do it, step by step:

1. Quilt as desired and trim edges nice and straight. Make sure you save the edges for string quilts in the future.

2. Cut binding to desired width. I used to cut it to 2 1/4 inches until I realized I could pull strips out of the 2.5 inch bin. This seems to work well for a double fold binding. I never worry about cutting on the bias because I don't do scallops or curves.

3. Join binding end to end by sewing on a diagonal with right sides together end to end. You can chain piece these without having to take the strips off of the sewing machine. Rotate the strips at right angles and peek to make sure your seam is going to open the right way.
4. Trim the triangles off the corner, you can save these for cute little HST units later if you want to make yourself a little crazy.
4. Press the seams open and press binding in half. If you are going to make lots of this ahead of time, it is easy to store on an empty paper towel roll until you are ready to use it.

And then came 29

I didn't want to change the thread on my machine until I had finished this quilt that I cut out yesterday. More of the Dresden Plate wedges, but with pink this time instead of the white. I had a mental moment when cutting the strips and made them too short. Instead of piecing them together or starting again, I just added a top and bottom border to make the size right. I guess it doesn't really matter, but I am trying to make them all about the same size. Kurt thinks it looks like a big Roman Numeral 3. I'll switch to my quilting foot tomorrow and get both of these quilted up. I'll do a quick binding tutorial at the same time, 'cause Amy is having trouble turning corners. I am now quite adept after about 116 corners on these little guys alone! I also have a nifty new shortcut for joining the ends. I'm sure someone else has done it before, but it is new to me. Tune in tomorrow for all this and more!

28, But Who's Counting?

This is Lap Quilt number 28! I stitched the binding down on number 27 last night while we corrupted the children with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The black and taupe four patches are from Goodwill shirts, and the gold print is something I had in the donation box. Kurt suggested the gold border to brighten it up a bit. It is spray basted, maybe I'll be able to get it quilted and bound while the kids have their baths and showers tonight. I have a variegated gold thread from Connecting Threads that should do the trick nicely.
We had Odyssey of the Mind this afternoon, and since we have it at our house, I spent some time clearing the dining room out again and moving my sewing things back into the guest bedroom. My parent-in-laws are coming through in a couple of weeks on the way home from a cruise, so I'll have to find out if they are staying over night to find out if I need to move everything out of the guest room and into the laundry room where it is supposed to live. There was an option to build our house with an extra room upstairs next to the toy room. Sometimes I think about how nice it would be to have a Studio where I could leave everything on a permanent basis. Maybe I can turn the toy room into that when the kids have outgrown toys. (It could happen;-))
Today was a lovely and relaxing Sunday. I didn't run this morning, and so relaxed with the Sunday paper. We spent a good bit of time outside playing, the weather was just about perfect. The kids cleaned the toy room with a minimum of fuss and then I took Anna out to buy a couple of new pairs of jeans. It's been so cold for almost two weeks now, that they have needed long pants every day! Very unusual for us, and we just didn't have that many pairs of long pants. I went for a run right after OM ended (just 6 miles), and got back just in time to shower before dinner. We're watching Kung Fu panda again now, getting ready for baths and bed. Not a bad weekend at all.
DARN, I just looked at the quilt picture and realized one of the four patches is rotated! Oh well, it is too late now to do anything about it. I'll call it a humility patch and move on with my life. I've always found it funny that anyone would feel the need to deliberately make mistakes in a quilt. Mine have enough naturally occurring mishaps.

Getting Closer Every Day

I'm not sure yet what the magic number is for lap quilts to take to the nursing home next month. But we are getting pretty close I think. This is a stack of 26 quilts almost ready to go. the 10 on the top still need their bindings stitched down, but the 16 on the bottom are done and ready to be delivered. Now I need to decide if I'm going to find something good on TV so I can sit and do hand stitching or go finish off the next two that I have in the works. I might compromise and cut out some men's shirts blocks. I cut two shirts apart on Thursday while watching the kids play outside. Now I need to turn them into strips and squares. I've also got another pile of edge trimmings to sort through, looking for usable scraps. I'm having so much fun playing with all this fabric. Maybe it's my short attention span, but it is so much fun to be looking at a new color combination every few minutes.

Fall Festival

Today was our annual fall festival at the kids school. It is the big fund raiser for the year for PTA and everyone puts in an appearance. We gave the kids $5 each in tickets and told them we could stay until they were gone. They chose the dunk booth, hair and face painting, a couple of bounce houses, crafts and carnival games. We did all of that and managed to make it home in just 2 hours. Not bad at all. Usually it in hot and sweaty, but this year is was almost chilly, with a brisk fall feel to the air.
I managed to stay late at work yesterday and get caught up on all of my grading. I love the satisfaction of empty "in" folders! I'm not sure how I managed to fill them all up so quickly after interims, but at least I'm up to date again. Then we visited the video store and all snuggled up on the couch with the movie Kung Fu Panda.

I managed to get in some serious machine time after all of that and am just about ready to finish up my parts on the last of the lap quilts. Some of the girls' work needed some minor cosmetic surgery to seal missed seams and flatten out bubbles, so I took care of those odds and ends while I put on the bindings. Miss Sheila is still doing the hand stitching, so that leaves me to make a few more quilts I hope. I also quilted the Dresden stripes using a meander in the stripes and some flowers and vines in the white stripes. I think we are getting close to our goal. I have to find out exactly how many residents are currently in our section of the nursing home so I know what the magic number is.

Loose Ends

I finally finished the last bit of binding on Dad's Plaids and got it washed, dried and on the bed. It has been really cold here lately, and I have had two quilts on the bed at night. I thought they should at least be big enough to actually fit on the bed. Since most of my quilts aren't king sized, finishing this one seemed like the best option.
Ryan has plans for a new quilt. He was practicing continuous line quilting patterns with me during Tuesday's SUM meeting and really took to the idea. He love mazes, so this was right up his alley. After looking at a few of my designs, he started branching out and coming up with his own ideas. He wants to use white and light blue and dark blue in stripes (hamburger, not hot dog) to make a trail and then quilt snails into the the trial that are traveling to the center of the earth. I showed him a rail fence pattern and he thought that might work well for his idea. The quilt is going to be about the same size as his last Pokemon quilt. It warms my heart to know that I am developing a whole new generation of quilters. Kurt has them hooked on Queen songs and Zucker Brother's movies, so I guess we all warp them in our own ways.

Dresden Stripes

I peeled the first 15 feet off of the Dresden plates strip and pieced together this stripy lap quilt. Kurt declared it "rather subdued" compared to my recent creations and said he actually liked this one. I guess you can follow the logic about what he thinks of my recent lap quilts. Maybe I'll do something decorative with the quilting. If I keep using the same basic pattern, I should be able make about 3 or 4 more of these, maybe I'll switch up the colors a little on the others.
Today was a Daisy Day for Sydney and she decided that she needed me to be there with her, so we all sat through another meeting this afternoon. It's not my turn for chess club chaperoning tomorrow, so I might make it through a few days in a row without a meeting to which I have to drag unwilling children.
It is still cold here, but I put on lots of layers and got in 5 miles with my running partner Tom tonight. I have a half marathon on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, so I should start to think about that. Hopefully it will stay cold for a while, the last three years have been unseasonably warm. It's much easier to run a marathon in the cold than in the heat.

Slow and Steady

Sydney learned a new song in music class. It starts, "Slow and steady, always ready, I will get there some day soon." Then the second verse starts, "I'm the fastest bunny rabbit, running is my happy habit." I like to think I'm the slow and steady, but lately I've been more like the rabid rabbit.
Last night was the second quilting session for our Girl Scout Troop. We are making good progress on the quilts. I always have a bell ringer to keep the girls busy while everyone is showing up. Last night I had them work on hand sewing the bindings on the quilts we had already finished. They are all still seriously lacking the fine motor skills to handle a blind hem stitch, but they gave it a good try. It was so busy that I forgot to take pictures, but when the quilts are finished, I'll get a picture of all of the girls with their quilts. They are all pretty proud of themselves.
Tonight was the leader meeting and training for cookie sales. We don't start selling cookies until January, but there won't be any more of the service unit meetings until after then. Kurt has clients in from out of town, so he's been out with them for the past two evenings. Sydney and Ryan entertained themselves in front of the TV last night during scouts, and all three of the kids came with me to tonight's meeting. I'll have to spend some quality time with them tomorrow to make up for it, because they were all very good.
Obviously there hasn't been a lot of progress on a personal quilting front. I finished chaining together the rest of my leftover Dresden plate blades. The plan was to turn them into a couple of lap quilts, but when I finished putting them together, I stretched them up and down the stairs and there were 6 flights! I Wrapped them up around a 12 inch ruler and counted 53 feet. I guess that is a little more than a couple of lap quilts. It does demonstrate the power of leaders and enders though, all of that was "free" sewing.
I finished gathering up the trimmings from the finished lap quilts and threw everything into my scrap basket. It is overflowing with lots of good stuff. Maybe my weekend project will be sorting through and cutting some more bits and pieces. It is like meditating for me, but with pretty colors. I also ordered a couple of scrap bags from Homestead Hearth, which I had seen linked in someones blog. They had some great sale fabric and I got several cuts along with the scraps. They have been washed, and are waiting to be ironed now, so I can get them put away.
I hope you are all having a good week, there is a cold snap here, and if it doesn't end soon we may have to turn on the heat! It made me think of the snow flurries I've seen mentioned already in other people's blogs and give thanks for living in Florida where our high near 69, low in the middle 40s seems like a hardship. The kids have had to find long pants and jackets! Happy quilting to you all, and stay warm and safe.