Have you ever wanted to know how to add piping to your binding? Someone asked about this technique, and I thought it sounded like a great thing to share!
I decided to make my own piping for this project, but you could buy prepared/store-bought piping and it works the same way. You need to buy enough to go all the way around your quilt plus a little extra for connecting in the corners.
If you want to make your own piping, you'll need enough ⅛” cotton cord to go all the way around your quilt. You'll also need enough fabric to cover the cord and a zipper foot for your machine. Some machines have cording or piping feet and those work great. I don't have such a special cording foot so I went with the zipper foot option.
From the fabric, cut enough 1¼” wide strips on the bias (45-degree angle) to cover the length of the cord. Sew your strips end to end and press the seams open.
Wrap the bias strips around the ⅛” cord and leave the first 3” or so open, before stitching with your zipper foot as close to the cord as possible. I move my needle, all the way to the left, and wrap the cord as I go with even amounts of fabric on both sides.
Now that the piping is prepared, it’s time to add it to the edge of the quilt.
I pinned the starting end in place leaving the first 4-5” unstitched, so I can join the ends when I come back around the quilt to this side. You'll want to start and stop along a long edge to make it easier to join the ends together. If you are using store-bought piping, you might want to start in a corner and just overlap the ends there when you have gone all the way around.
I'm sewing the piping to the front of the quilt and stitching it down along the same stitch line I used when making the piping. Notice I am using my stiletto to hold things in place as I sew.
When you come to a corner, stop about 1-2” shy of the corner and clip the flange of the piping up to the stitch line ¼” from the corner. I clip mine in at an angle because it’s easier to do on the fly… this little clip will help the piping hinge around the corner to go up the next side.
Here is what it will look like once all four corners are clipped and pivoted.
Once you have gone all the way around and are back at the starting point, you'll want to leave an opening of about 6” or so. I joined the end of the fabric at an angle following this technique from a blog I did a while back. You'll love the foolproof success you get when joining your binding ends this way. So if that’s something you struggle with, check out my video from that blog.
Once the fabric ends were joined and pressed open, I cut the cord ends short enough to meet each other inside the piping fabric. Pin it in place and stitch up the remaining opening. The piping is on, now it’s time for the binding.
I make my binding as usual. In this case, I might do a 2½” binding instead of 2¼” since there is more bulk to wrap around. I sewed the binding to the back of the quilt (but you could sew it to the front and wrap it to the back to hand-stitch in place), still using the zipper foot and riding along the edge of the bump that the piping on the front side caused. If you haven’t seen my video on basic machine binding, that might be worth checking out for this step. It's much the same technique for this part.
The binding is sewn all the way around and the ends are joined together. I wrapped the binding to the front side, right up snug with the piping. I'm still using the zipper foot for this part to get as close as possible to the piping as I top-stitch the binding in place.
At the corners, I fold the bottom up first, and then the side wraps over. I used my stiletto again to hold that little fold in place as I stitched it down.
And here it is! All done and as fun and funky as can be :)
Happy Sunday, everyone!
Krista