#bias binding

[cottonkhaleesi]

I bought some supplies to finish this and ended up with four colours of bias because I couldn’t choose (also it’s nice to have some for the next project and the zips were on clearance)

Went with the sparkly in the end.

[alexsrandomramblings]

Welp, that's the bias binding been made. The fabric was $20 a yard, but I only used half of it, so comes up to around $25 when you factor in time to make it being an hour at $15 an hour. But of course no one's paying me to make my own clothes. But it really puts into perspective how much clothing probably should be costing if we gave people a decent wage.

[professorpski]

https://www.threadsmagazine.com/Threads, Spring 2021

The new issue of Threads magazine is out for spring and a cheerful, pink  floral dress graces the cover. That is one of several articles on construction techniques including shirt collar buttonholes, the fly zipper, and changing a fly zipper to a side opening hidden in a pocket.

The pink dress by Susan Khalie accompanies an article explaining how to hide a zipper in a dart when you don’t want a seam at that spot on the garment. Kenneth D. King explain bias binding on the golden vest made from Simplicity pattern 4079, which is out of print, but as he modified it a great deal, you should not feel you have lost much if you settle on another fitted vest pattern. King explains how to prepare the garment for what he calls a “French binding” which is a doubled bias binding applied first to the outside edge and then turned to the inside.

There are several articles on fitting and one by Pamela Howard encouraging what she calls subtle shaping which you see in the blue print dress before and after. Do have the courage to baste garment seams and darts in order to improve the fit of a garment. I do this so often that when I was looking for the label in a worn-out ready-to-wear blouse to make a note of it because it fit so well, I realized that I had added darts to it when i first got it which is why it fit so well.

For embellishment technique, Cindy Loeskamp has written on painting rayon lace which would be useful for both contrasting trim or when you cannot find the exact color you seek. The feature on the competition winners from the annual meeting of the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals is also full of embellishment ideas. 

In short, lots of lessons on everything from pattern cutting to final touches, along with pattern reviews, product reviews, Q & A column and more. You can find it here or at your local bookstore or newsstand: https://www.threadsmagazine.com/

[bluephone]

Making piping! It turned out to be much easier than I expected. I used this tutorial from over at Closet Case Patterns.

[johnthestitcher]

Sewing the binding on my quilt. It is approximately 10.5 yards around the outside of the quilt - machine applied and now being hand finished at @ 6 stitches per inch. I have already ripped out several sections if a dark stitch came through to the top. Almost to the third corner where I have to remove and re-set the fold in corners 3 & 4 to get the mitre to lie flatter. When done, I may also completely rip out the first corner: the backing is flat but the batt and top seem to curl slightly - will re-baste the 3 layers to be flatter and re-apply the corner.Yes - this is the last quilt I will ever make (over 30 years in the making) and although I have a lot of balls to enter this ‘traditional quilt’ in a competition against the many ‘art quilts’ that usually get entered, I want to be remembered for my precision.

[20dollarlolita]

Continuous Bias and HK Hem Finishes

Bias tape can be a pain to make, but there’s a few ways that are easier than others.

Bias strips are very useful for a lot of things. The make good seam finishes, hem finishes, add cute detailing, and are pretty cheap in terms of things we do. Here, I stuck some on this netting, which would stop the raw edges of the net from snagging delicate fabrics like chiffons.

Bias tape comes in a few colors and widths, and it can get expensive if you want to us it to bind a petticoat hem or something similar.

Bias strips are strips of fabric cut on the bias of the fabric.

I made a graphic on the importance of bias a while ago but it turns out it’s faster to make a new one, so here you go. 

The green lines are the threads in your woven fabric. Since our woven fabric here isn’t made out of a stretchy fiber like spandex or elastic, the individual threads in the fabric will not get longer or shorter if you pull directly on the fibers. This is why we line a lot of what we’re cutting up on the grainline, which is the line the threads run in. Most of the time, when we’re not using a stretch fabric, we don’t want our fabric to stretch.

But magical things happen on the bias of the fabric. The bias is a line that runs 45 degrees to the grainline. When you pull on the bias of a fabric, it stretches. This is because you’re not pulling on any one thread, so the whole fabric can compress and rebound. Because of this bias stretch, you can use bias strips to band or bind or face curves. 

You can also cut fabric on the bias to get a woven to act more like a knit. Fabrics cut on the bias drape and shift a little bit more, which is great when you’re looking for that, and can be a problem if you forgot to cut on the grain and now have a shifty piece to work with. (Bias cut full-body gowns were more or less invented by Madeleine Vionnet and this specific image is from Edith Head)

One of the other cool things about bias strips is that they don’t fray. They can get a little rough at the edge, but they will never reach the point where long, ugly threads are releasing themselves from your hem and making a desperate break for freedom.

There’s nothing really sneaky tricky about making bias strips. You just set your fabric down, draw strips at a 45 degree angle, cut them, sew them, and repeat until you’re bored to tears.

...

or you can use the Magical Continuous Spiral Bias Strip Method and avoid almost all of that.

(Warning: I’m still moving, and most importantly, I have not yet got an area run to cover up this gross, stained carpet. You will just have to look at this gross, stained carpet. My apologies)

So the first thing you want to do is to get yourself a rectangle of fabric. This one’s about 13.5″x44″ (3/8ths of a yard of a regular quilting fabric). Start by ripping a little bit off each cut side, so that you know you’ll have an on-grain rectangle.

Then, fold both short sides into little triangles like the one I have here, and cut the triangles off to use for later.

Now, take a marking tool of some kind and a ruler, and mark lines every 2″ apart.

2″ is a good measure for this, because that makes you a 1/2″ bias tape, or gives you some extra with the HK finish.

If you’re not sure which direction to go, look at the grain in the fabric. If you can follow a thread from the fabric down the length of a strip, you cut the strips in the wrong direction. These are bias strips, so your lines you’re drawing should go along the bias.

(I should really have cropped these pictures. I’m just not feelin’ it today, folks. That’s what my cell phone looks like, sorry)

So now you’re going to fold your parallelogram into a tube, matching each line to another line.

The trick is that you don’t want to line each piece up with the other end of that line. You need to offset your loop, so that each line connects with the line under it. Basically, you’re making a giant spiral.

Take care when you’re pinning this to make sure your lines actually match, and then sew it down.

Once you’ve got it sewn, you’ll see the end you should start at. It’ll be hanging down at one end, because of the way you offset your pinning.

Now you can start cutting along that line, and it’ll carry you all the way down to the very bottom of the strip.

Now you have a long bias strip, and only had to sew one seam.

But wait, there’s more. Take those two triangles you cut off the end of your fabric. Sew them like this, so they unfold into their own parallelogram.

Now grab your ruler, mark 2″ lines along the bias like you did for the first one, and use those too.

I like to wash my marks out of my tape in hot water, and then give it a really good press before making it into tape or binding.

You can use your iron and form it all into tape, if you want.

However, if you’re doing a super long, bound hem, like for a petticoat, you can save yourself some time and do a different kind of hem finish.

Here’s my petticoat netting, and here’s my bias strip. Since I’m using a bias strip for this, I don’t really need pins. Line the edge of the bias strip and the edge of the netting. Sew the two of them together at whatever width you want your binding to be. I wanted 1/2″, so I sewed a line 1/2″ away from the edge of the netting and the edge of the bias strip.

I took it over to my iron and gave it a quick press open.

Then I folded it back behind the netting, covering the hem edge of the netting.

Sew it down in the ditch. This means your needle should be very close to the front of your binding, but shouldn’t actually be sewing on the front of your binding.

Now you just go through it with your scissors or some pinking shears, and cut away that excess binding. I cut it pretty close here, and it might have been better to have 1/16th of an inch more as wiggle room. Since it’s bias-cut, the edge won’t fray on you. Use your pinking shears if you’re really worried or if you want that vintage look.

And there you go, way faster than bias tape for huge, long things like the hems of lolita skirts.

[loveslavandula]

Joseph's Coat of Many Colors by Lori Via Flickr: Blogged here 60" square ~Hand pieced and hand quilted ~January 1995 For the pattern, I used the old cardboard template, pencil tracing method. No rotary cutting involved. The first and only quilt class I ever took. I think I was only there for the fabric sharing! Not sure if anyone else even finished theirs.

[alexsrandomramblings]

Ordered some super cute homemade cotton bias binding that just arrived. Wasn't sure from the photos which would work best for the project so I just ended up getting both because, again, super cute.