My First Quilt: Binding and Finishing
Cue Etta James…. AT LAST. I have finished My First Quilt! What an absolute experience this has been – but first let’s get into how I finished it.
The binding was the part of the quilting process that I thought I would have down with no problem. I watched 5 or 6 machine binding videos to prepare and was so sure I was going to breeze through this. Surprise to me when I ran into multiple issues!
Cutting the strips 2.5″ wide came easily. I used the extra 108″ black fabric I bought for the backing and sewed the four very long strips together on the bias. Pressing the fabric in half also came easily, no trouble there at all! Where my issues began was when I made the most beginner mistake of all time and sewed the binding on to the entire quilt using a 1/2″ seam (if you’re also a beginner, this should have been a 1/4″ seam). I only realized my mistake after I tried to fold the binding over to the back and found that it did not reach all the way to the back. I wish you all could have seen my face… if you follow me on instagram you most likely did see my eyeroll.
Humble brag time… this was the first mistake I made on the quilt so I was crushed when I discovered what I had done. I didn’t beat myself up over it, I just sighed and then attempted to pick out the seam stitch by stitch with my seam ripper… which didn’t last 5 minutes until I was so antsy and aggravated. As I do with everything else in life, I apply the “work smarter, not harder” motto and took to Google. I am so thankful that I instantly found a short video on YouTube of a woman showing how to seam rip a quilt using a surgical blade. I didn’t have a surgical blade, but I did have an Exacto knife! Which worked perfectly. Basically, you just carefully work the blade between the backing fabric and the binding fabric and cut each thread as you come to it instantly. Once I got the hang of it, I was able to remove all the binding within 10 minutes. Thanks, internet.
I resewed the binding strip on at 1/4″, being extra careful, and I was able to finger press and fold the fabric around to the back of the quilt. I should have stopped here and taken a break, or resumed the binding the next day… but I kept on going. Which is what I think contributed to my next mistake. I was still antsy from the mistake earlier, just so anxious to finish the quilt, so I sewed FAST. And because I sewed fast, I pulled the binding over farther in some spots than others. All this means is that some parts of the binding were stitched on the very edge of the fabric and some parts of the binding were stitched about 1/5″ from the edge of the fabric. This will probably only ever be noticed by me and is not a big deal at all; however, its a lesson learned to be patient when sewing and to also probably use quilting clips.
The last and final mistake I made came about from my attempts at mitered corners. Looking back now, this was mostly to “blame” on a bad binding tutorial that I was following for the corners…. but I digress. Long story short, I struggled on the corners. Lucky for me, the black binding is very forgiving and the struggle is only visible if you’re staring at the corners closely. Which no one will be doing. so it’s okay. I have since watched about an hours worth of mitered corners videos and now completely understand a much better way to go about it.
With that final binding stitch, I felt relief, accomplishment, pride, and exhaustion. I laid the quilt out on the floor, took one terrible photo on my phone, folded it up and went to relax on the couch. I finished the quilt on a Sunday evening and spent the next 5 days waiting for a sunny day to take proper finished quilt photos. It’s my first quilt, so I wanted the photos to be special. I had my boyfriend Aldo hold up the quilt against the backdrop of an abandoned building, which provided just the juxtaposition I was looking for. And that was it. The end of my first quilt making experience.
But not the end of my quilting overall. Nope, I’m going to keep going thanks to this experience. I have found something that I love, something that allows me to create and actually enjoy the end result, something that has allowed me to meet new friends and become introduced to so many new artists online, something that makes me really happy. I hope that you will continue to follow along as I explore modern quilting; from selling quilts to creating patterns, I am ready to do it all.
Thank you for the support, thank you for the kindness, thank you for the inspiration!
