Quilts

Faced Binding Tutorial

August 5, 2013December 15, 2014 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

A faced binding is applied to the front of your quilt and is wrapped to the back. If done well, it can’t be seen at all from the front, allowing the last border of your quilt to act as the frame for your quilt, and eliminating one last design element from your quilt. Often used on art quilts, when an additional line of a border would distract from the art, it can be also be used on our regular quilts.

I used it on Kaleidoscope, as the printed border needed no other embellishment.

Step One: Prepare the quilt and strips
Trim the batting and edges of your quilt. In the best world, your trimmed line falls at the edge of your fabric. A little fudging here and there is okay.

For the binding, you’ll need four strips, one for each edge. Measure the edges of your quilt and add 10 extra inches to that measurement.

Cut 4″ wide strips for a medium- or large-sized quilt, and 3″ wide strips for smaller quilts.

If you need to piece the strip to provide the right length, trim both ends at a right angle (make sure they are slanted the same way) and piece together on the bias. Fold the strip in half lengthwise and iron.

Step Two: Applying Binding Strips
Leaving a tail on each side of about 5 inches, pin the binding strip to the FRONT of your quilt, raw edges even, with the folded edge of the binding falling toward the quilt center, just like you would for a regular binding. Only this binding is giant-sized, and you won’t stitch around the corners continuously.

Continue pinning the strips onto each side. Pin the strip nearly to the end, as you’ll be leaving the last one-quarter-inch of each seam unsewn.

I measured one-quarter-inch from each corner edge, and placed a pin there to remind me to stop sewing.

Stitch on the binding, using a quarter-inch seam allowance, and stopping at your placed pin, 1/4″ from the edge.

Step Three: Mitering the Corner

Take the quilt to your ironing board and using a light touch, press the binding strips away from your quilt.

Mitered Corner2

Then lay the quilt so you can fold back the binding tails, as shown. Work to have a perfectly straight 45-degree angle on those folds where they meet; use a ruler to help you align it, if necessary. Press. The slight gap you see there between the folds is normal–the folds relax when you take the iron off. It’s better to have a slight gap than to have an overlap.

Another view, but this is just fingerpressed. While you can just fingerpress the folds, I think it’s better to get a hot iron on there so you can see the crease. (See next image.) Remember that you are pressing through double-folded fabric, so do a thorough job.

Unfold and align the binding strips for the first corner, making sure the pressed diagonal lines meet and folding the quilt down and out of the way. You are also making sure the top folded edges meet. I try not to pin this next seam to death, instead using only three pins:

• #1–Place a pin at the outer, folded edges of each binding strip and line the creases up.

• #2–Then go to the bottom, near where it’s joined to the quilt, and poke a pin from the top crease down into the bottom crease, lining them up.

• #3–Lastly, line up the creases at the center and place a pin there.

Again, you are pinning along the crease you made when you ironed in that beautiful miter at the ironing board.

Stitch the seam. You’ll begin stitching from the folded, outer edges and sew back towards the quilt-binding seam (at the bottom of the picture). There’s really no need to “tack” by backstitching. So don’t. Just leave your thread tails long and you should be fine.

Trim the extra fabric to one-quarter-inch, as shown, then press the seam open.

This is the backside of that mitered join up above. Notice how the seam allowances become smaller at the point? That’s because I trimmed them down to eliminate bulk. Trim out as much of the batting as you can, while making sure you don’t cut the stitching. Don’t skip this step. Just proceed carefully. (You will be fine.)

Step Four: Understitching
Often used when attached a facing to a neckline in dress-making, understitching is a technique to join the weensy seam allowances to the faced binding, which will keep them from rolling to the front and showing on your quilt.

First, since you pressed the binding away from the quilt up above, you’ve already started on this step. If you didn’t press at that time, do your best to press it now, going as far into the corner as your iron will allow.

Line up your needle so you are just to the right of the binding seam. Stitch a straight line, smoothing the binding and the quilt away from the seam as you go, keeping a light tension on the quilt/binding fabric. Light. The success of understitching depends on not letting the binding bunch up toward the quilt, nor wandering in your stitching onto the quilt. Stay on the binding, smooth away the binding and it will go as smooth as butter.

Of course you can’t sew deep into the corner, so go as far as you can and cut the thread tails long. Now begin again on the next side. You’re almost there.

Step Five: Sewing down the Binding

Carefully turn the binding to the back of your quilt, giving it a quick press, if needed. Gently ease out the corners. If you are brave and not foolhardy, you can use a chopstick to help ease out the tip. But if you go too far, you’ll have a mess on your hands. Proceed gingerly.

If after turning, you think your corners are distorted and look like the tips of a witch’s shoe, a little pulling at the side edges, just below the tip, will shorten that tip and bring it back into shape. Set it with a little shot of steam from your iron, then press it with your fingers or a piece of wood until it cools. Seamstresses use “clappers,” or smoothed wooden tools just for this purpose. However, it’s better to lay a piece of cloth down and put your tender fingers on that, that to smash the heck out of it with a hot iron. Never over-iron your quilts, or blocks, for that matter! A horribly flattened block means that, to me, someone has decided to start wearing out their quilts early.

You’ll stitch the binding down by hand, just as you do a regular quilt binding. Now you can clip those long thread tails on the top of the binding as you come to them. Tuck the long tails that are on the backside of the binding up inside–no need to trim those. If you find your miter is buckling just a little and has too much fabric, with your handsewing needle take a small tuck and secure it with tiny stitches.

All done!

This is what the binding looks like from the back, when finished.

And this is the binding from the front–invisible!

Note: If you need to attach a quilt sleeve for hanging, you’ll create your tube of fabric and stitch it on now, aligning the top edge 1/2″ to 3/4″ down from the top, and leaving a slight bulge in the sleeve to leave room for the hanging rod.

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Congruence, Deconstructed

August 2, 2013October 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Our reveal for the fourth challenge quilt in our art group, Four-in-Art Quilters, was yesterday and today I’ll tell you how it came together.

I first started by looking a what seemed like billions of photos of owls. I did a lot of this through Flickr, where I found this photo:

I wrote to Matt Smith, the person who posted it, and asked permission to use this photo and he gave it to me. And then I sat on it for a couple of months, not knowing how to approach this. Did I want to paper-piece it? Not really. Embroider it? Pixelate it into little squares? None seemed satisfying. And then it was in the background reading that it came to me that I would fracture it, play with it a little and see where that went.

I digitally chopped the owl picture into fourths and then chopped into fourths again, making sixteen parts. And then I began to play with filters, one of the least used, but really fun parts of Photoshop. I applied at least one, and sometimes multiple filters to each segment, approximating the sizes so I could get this bird back together again in the end. You can see the mock-up on the lower right. That was me, trying to reassure myself.

Then I printed it off on paper, cut it apart, and still tried to reassure myself. I grabbed a previous art quilt off the wall (I knew it was 12″ square) to use as a template. It seemed okay. But how to get it to fabric? I usually iron freezer paper to the back of a piece of fabric, tape that to a piece of paper like I did in English Elizabeth, then run it through my Epson color printer. But I’d read in a blog about someone who simply ironed the fabric and freezer paper together, making sure it was a standard paper size, and then ran it through the printer.

Don’t you love the ink smudges? The next time, I made sure the freezer paper was really well-adhered to the fabric, then set the printings for thick matte paper on high quality and ran it through again, using a long thin tool to assist it through the last phases and so the fabric wouldn’t touch anything. The closest thing I could grab was a nail file — but it worked.

I peeled off the freezer paper carefully and cut apart my sixteen squares of Mr. Owl.

Layering the background — Kona Ash — with the backing and batting. Kona Ash? Light taupey gray? Cindy of Live a Colorful Life is probably laughing her head off now because she knows how much I hate gray. Really, I do. In so many modern quilts it acts as a big hole in the composition, especially if it’s a medium gray. I think if a quilter has to go gray in a quilt (and I’m not talking about those low-volume quilt compositions where it is intentional and where it works) they ought to go charcoal. Or slate. Ash is what I had on hand, as I don’t generally keep gray around (I bought it for a bee block I had to do). But it worked for this as the picture, except for the owl’s eyes, is all in taupes and grays. Yeah, low-volume.

Using the paper mock-up as a guide, I start layering the cloth images onto the backing.

Moving things around, trimming down the pieces so some aren’t square, trying for balance. Trying for that little artist’s lightbulb to go off in my head. I got about a night-light’s worth of illumination, but from my writing in grad school, I knew that showing up wouldn’t get you anywhere–you have to keep trying. To fully put this concept into action, I went to dinner, then let it sit for a week while I went to our quilt retreat.

Then one morning it was simply time to tackle it again. I couldn’t decide between satin-stitching a thicker line (close zig-zagging) or straight-stitching a narrow line of thread around each piece. Narrow won. I trimmed it up to 12 inches and then thought I’d like to try a faced binding (tutorial on how to do a faced binding coming in a couple of days).

I cut strips to match the backing, sewed them on.

When I ironed them to the back on a couple of sides, it became apparent that I needed that “frame” of the binding for this particular quilt. Rip off the binding.

I kind of liked the way the binding corralled those tiled pieces.

I made the label, sewed it on, then went outside to photograph it. I made an interesting discovery.

This lower section of the feathered wing imitated the gnarly bark of my silk oak tree in my backyard. Maybe because I’d dampened the literal image of feathers with Photoshop filters? I don’t know, but I liked the effect.

So, all the incongruent small pieces — the images, the tiling, the layering, the stitching — all merged into a lovely congruence of an owl, just like the metaphoric meanings discussed yesterday. All combine into that creature that captures our imagination while mystifying us as well.

And now I leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver, that I think captures this idea:

“Praise,” by Mary Oliver

Knee-deep
in the ferns
springing up
at the edge of the whistling swamp,

I watch the owl
with its satisfied,
heart-shaped face
as it flies over the water–

back and forth–
as it flutters down
like a hellish moth
wherever the reeds twitch–

whenever, in the muddy cover,
some little life sighs
before it slides into moonlight
and becomes a shadow.

In the distance,
awful and infallible,
the old swamp belches.
Of course

It stabs my heart
whenever something cries out
like a teardrop.
But isn’t it wonderful,

What is happening
in the branches of the pines:
the owl’s young,
dressed in snowflakes,

are starting to fatten–
they beat their muscular wings,
they dream of flying
for another million years

over the water,
over the ferns,
over the world’s roughage
as it bleeds and deepens.

from House of Light, 1990

Quilts

Congruence, a Four-in-Art Challenge Quilt

August 1, 2013August 12, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Congruence, #4 in the Four-in-Art Nature series

In one of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Praise,” she watches an owl “as it flies over the water” with its “heart-shaped face,” hunting down “some little life. . . before it slides into moonlight and becomes a shadow.” She wrote multiple poems about nature, and owls were a featured bird in her poetry. She captured their qualities from their nocturnal hunting to their perceived wisdom to their wildness. As I read further about owls, the more I discovered. I felt the owl — or its ideal –was being fractured into many parts.

Some say the owl is wise, other say evil. Some say the owl brings death, other say he represents the ideal of living for a millennium. I couldn’t find any sources that agreed on what an owl represented metaphorically, and so I, too, began to see the owl as fractured, of being composed of multiple parts. And so I present my version of an owl, a congruence of many similar, yet disparate parts.

This is the 4th challenge under the heading of Nature for the art quilt group Four-in-Art. Initially that number four denoted the four of us (see below for their quilts), but we have now stretched our group to eight, so in November (when our next challenge is due) we’ll have other quilts to look at.

I found this theme to be a challenge, yet am happy with what came to me and how it fell into place. Do I feel it was a home-run? Hmmmm. But even a base hit will get you started round the bases, and double or a triple will get you a good way towards home plate. When I began this year-long process, I had no idea how it would work, or even if everyone would stick with me to the end. But for this to work, I needed to see their home runs, their doubles and triples in order to grow. Congruence now hangs in my studio, the last in a line of four quilts that have become a narrative to a new kind of journey in quilting. So, to my fellow Four-in-Art artists, I say a heartfelt and mighty thank you. You are the best.

Leanne of She Can Quilt

Rachel of The Life of Riley

Betty — who did two! — from her Flickr site

Tomorrow, I’ll deconstruct Congruence, quilt #119 on my 200 Quilts list, and tell how I put it together.

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Our next year-long theme is Urban, and our first challenge is Maps.
I’ll have a future post about ideas for this.

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This is another finish for the Finish-A-Long, organized and championed by Leanne, of She Can Quilt (yes! one of our Four-in-Art artists!).

Quilts

Amish With a Twist 2–progress

July 31, 2013April 27, 2014 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Today I’m all caught up with my Amish With A Twist-2 Block of the Month program with the completion of these four, plus the components shown below.

I think these will eventually become part of the center star.

I’d be lost without my color sample cards–I snip off a bit of selvage and write the name on it (and underneath) along with the color number. It REALLY helps.

I also cut each block’s pieces all at once, then store them inside the pattern, all folded up for when I can get to the sewing. Done in parts, this quilt will be manageable, I think.

4-in-art_3

Check back tomorrow for our Four-in-Art Challenge Art Quilt Reveal! I’m pretty excited about it, having seen bits and pieces of my fellow quilters’ works. In addition, if you are a Schnibbles fan, Sherri and Sinta will have our newest Schnibbles on display, plus let us know what the next quilt will be. (Here’s mine!)

But today, I’m linking up to Lee’s Freshly Pieced for Works In Progress Wednesday.