How to sew your Bias cut strips together

In my last post I covered how to cut bias strips which can be used for bias binding or bias tape. Here's how I joined those strips together.

Each end of my bias strips is at a 45° angle if you refer back to my previous post (below) you can see the second strip from the left does not have a 45° angle. This was only with the fat quarter, when I cut my 44 x 44" fabric square into strips all my ends were 45°. This is were I would recommend always working with a square.

Matching right sides together I join my strips with ¼" seams at the valleys.

If you check with a ruler your stitching should be on the ¼" mark.

Now when you open your strip it should look like this.

I ended up with a pile like this

Then it's off to the ironing board were you can either iron it in half for quilt binding

 or you can make bias tape.

My 44" square of fabric made 22½ yards of bias binding.

The fat quarter made just a little shy 4½ yards. 

Which if you do the math is nearly the same per ¼ yard of fabric

Thanks for reading♥

How to cut bias binding or bias tape

I've always bound my quilts with regular strips of fabric which honestly has worked great but with seeing rounded corners and curves on quilt edges I knew I'd would have to change my methods. Here's how to fold your fabric to cut bias strips with your rotary cutter.
I'm going to demonstrate the following with a fat quarter which is 18 x 22 working with a square would be best but to satisfy even my own curiosity I'm going to use the whole fat quarter to see how much it makes.

First I like to lay my fabric face down.

Then fold the top left corner down to the bottom. with a square you would just match corner to corner.

Next take the upper right and bring it down to the lower left.

 Make sure to match up the bottom edges as shown below. 

when folded it will look like this. If you were working with a square you would now have a triangle shape.

Now we are going to take the bottom left and fold it up to the upper right. This makes more sense when your working with a larger piece of fabric because you need to fold it up to a manageable piece to cut.

And finally turn to face you. 

Onto the cutting. The small triangles on the right are all that's left for waste.

The next photos are of the large 44 x 44" piece of fabric I cut. I wanted to work with a square this time.

I folded my fabric exactly the same as above for the fat quarter.

Then I marked my ruler with glow line tape.

First I cut off the folded edge to my left.

and then proceeded to cut strips all the way to the end, the last little triangle cut at the end was my waste.

That was a lot to cover in one post. Lots of pictures. I hope all the instructions are clear, please let me know if anything doesn't make sense. In my next post I'll cover how I sew these strips together.

Thanks for reading♥

Curved Safety Pins and Covers

I wish I would have photographed more of the steps I took because I know I like pictures so I will revisit this subject again on my next project. Basically I was pin basting my quilt on the dinning table, in the past I've tried other methods and didn't always like my results. If you have any suggestions on pin basting please share or if you just have a favorite way you like to pin baste I'd love to hear it.
Anyways as I said I was pinning and ran out of pins. Oh no! I think with previous projects I wasn't pinning close enough so I ran out this time and needed to invest in some more. First I found curved safety pins and then the covers and the kwik klip to easily remove and attach the pins without cursing too much. Here's my project pinned up.

Here's something that helped me as I quilted, I used the safety pins to pin the rolled up fabric as I quilted each row.

This really helped me. My quilting is all done and it's on to the binding.
Thanks for reading♥

Scoodie

For today's post I have for you the Scoodie which is a hooded scarf. I followed the instructions for the free pattern which were pretty simple. Here's how mine turned out.

I did this all in fleece thinking as the weather gets yucky and cold this will keep my friend warm. This was sew easy I may make some more.

Thanks for reading♥