Saturday, June 12, 2010

A Baby Quilt in Three Parts, part 3

Here it is, the final hurrah!  This is how I finished my baby quilt and sent it off to the lucky recipient.  And by that I mean, will send it off to the lucky recipient almost 2 months late.  I hope it's the thought that counts.
I started by making the quilt binding - lots and lots of quilt binding.  I knew I wanted the binding to be a little thicker, so I cut a bunch of 3-4 inch bias strips.  I figured this measurement using a really fancy technique called "using the width of your ruler".
I sewed these strips into one really really long strip.  In the end, I had probably 16 feet of bias tape.  I don't actually know how long it was but it was a lot - I estimated high.  Once I had this strip ready to go, I ironed it into submission.  In case you have never done this before, you basically fold the outside edges into the center and iron, then fold those folded edges into the center again and iron.  Somewhere along the way, I learned a trick in doing this.  When creating the first crease, you off set where "center" really is. One side will end up being slightly longer than the other, which will come in handy later.  The best help I can give you comes deep within this tutorial, see step 4.
Yes, that is a lot of bias tape, but in actuality, it really was pretty close to the right amount.  I only had enough left over to tie around the quilt for packaging and also to torture my dog.  Speaking of my tortured dog, here she is.  She secretly LOVES this look!
But anyway, now that I had the bias tape all ready to go, it was time to sew it on.  To be honest, this is by far the best and easiest explanation of how to sew on bias tape, so please go check it out (and commit it to your memory...or bookmark the location.  Unless you have amazing powers of memory, you will need to refer back).  Basically, though, you line up the longer end of the bias tape with the back of the quilt, and you sew in the fold so that your seam can't be seen.  Be careful around the corners - I just googled how to do this so that I didn't mess it up completely.  I made it through - you can too.  To sew the front, you fold the bias tape over and topstitch the whole thing down.  Because your top edge of the bias tape is just ever so slightly shorter then the bottom, as long as you are careful, you will automatically catch the bottom portion even though you can't see it.
Here is the picture where I have pinned it on, before I started sewing the second side.  I like to use pins.  They help make up for my mediocre sewing.  Anyway, that's pretty much that.  It was an easy process that really only took a few hours altogether, I just had to chunk them out to work around my time schedule.  And of course the remaining 6ish weeks that it took me to write about it and, uh, send it off.  I'll leave you with pictures of the finished project.

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