Striped binding

Ta-dah!  Striped binding!  I have never used stripes for binding before, partly because I haven’t seen one that went with what I was working on, and partly because I thought joining stripes would be fussy.  I really don’t want the seams in the binding to jump out at anyone.

I found a bright green vertical stripe print that will be a nice accent to finish off a runner. After auditioning it, I decided diagonal stripes would have a bigger impact, which meant bias binding instead of straight grain binding.  All the tutorials I found about matching stripes in binding were for straight grain binding, so in the end I just cut and joined some bias strips and hoped for the best.

Here’s what I found out.  Joining binding strips at a 45 degree angle reduces bulk in the finished binding.  Depending how I cut those 45 degree cuts at the ends of the strips, I got two different looks.

Cutting across the stripe on the ends of each strip

resulted in a seam that looks like this:

Cutting parallel to the stripe on the ends of each strip

 gave this result:

Guess what I preferred? (In case you aren’t sure: I chose option #2.)

Of course I figured this out after sewing strips together willy-nilly, with the angled ends of the strips in whichever orientation they ended up from cutting the bias strips from the rectangle of fabric.  I decided it was worth cutting out the seams that didn’t match up and recutting the strip ends parallel to the stripe.

Trim tip

If you’re wondering why the tips of the angled cuts are cut off, here’s what’s going on with that. I used my corner trimmer to trim the tips to avoid guessing whether my strips were offset correctly to sew to end up with a straight joined strips.

Guessing where to line up

Trimmed tips line up with edges perfectly

The trimmed tips just help me line everything up just right.

Now that I have the binding made, and the backing prepared, there’s nothing left to do but quilt the runner.  I’ve been putting it off because I’m not entirely sure what to quilt, but there’s a deadline approaching. Tomorrow I’ll just have to get started and hope that inspiration strikes by the time I have finished all the stitching in the ditch!

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Unrelated to quilting:  Can anyone recommend a blog editor that I can use to write my posts offline, then upload them to Blogger?  I used Live Writer, which let me format things the way I wanted, but it has recently stopped getting along with Blogger.  The built-in Blogger editor is driving me batty!  I suppose I'll get used to it, but if you can suggest anything else, I'd be grateful!