Quilting with your Domestic Machine Part 5: Binding with the Quilt Binder

It’s so big that my husband and my dad had to stand on chairs to hold it up!!

It’s done. I can’t believe that it’s finally finished!!! I have so enjoyed this project and sharing all these tips and tricks along the way with you. ( please refer to parts 1-4 of this series right here on Janomelife. There are links to these at the bottom of this posts).

I finished up today by putting the binding on my massively large oversize queen quilt. I found the same set up very helpful: cleared away space on the table so that my sewing table can support it. At this stage in the quilting game, you can leave your quilt stacked on top of itself during the binding process because you only need access to the very edge.

Using the Janome Quilt Binder has some amazing benefits:  less fabric used (only 2″ strips instead of 2.5 “); less time spent (only sewing the edge once instead of twice, plus all the time spent pressing and folding over your binding), and the ability to have a perfect binding every time.  I also used the Tape Stand to hold my rolled up binding strip. This was so helpful to avoid choking myself on a necklace of binding. (I know you’re laughing at this visual, but we’ve all done it haha).

For detailed info on how to install your Quilt Binder to your machine, click here. What I love about this attachment is how adjustable it is to suit your individual preferences. It’s easily adjusted with the location of the mouth of the binder, and also the angle that it’s placed at.

A few other tips that I found were very helpful were joining my strips at a 45 degree angle, and then trimming down the excess to a 1/4″ seam. Don’t forget to take those dog ears off too! Having as consistent and smooth a width as possible makes the strips feed through the binder much easier. I also found leaving my seams unpressed helped them to feed through smoothly to one side.

Make sure you put your fabric strip with the WRONG side facing you, so that as they pass through the mouth of the binder they are right side out.

Don’t worry about the thickness of the quilt and it possibly getting stuck. I had no problems with this at all! The foot for this attachment has a shorter toe, so it is easy to maneuver your binding underneath it. There are tons of other fabulous posts on this Janomelife blog about using the Quilt Binder, so make sure to check them out by doing a search in the search box to the right on the home page – just type Quilt binder in this search box.

I also really appreciated the indented line on the foot, showing optimal placement of your needle for stitching. This spot, about 2.5, was perfect for having enough seam allowance and also stitching close to the folded edge. If you want to use a decorative stitch for sewing your binding down, you can definitely do so. In fact, you could mirror your chosen stitch to have the base of the stitch line up with the foot indent.

It took about an hour to do the binding from start to finish: cutting the strips, joining them, setting up the machine and stitching the binding. In my opinion, it was much, much faster that the traditional method of attaching binding (plus no need to poke my finger sewing it on by hand!)

I really hope you have enjoyed this series on Quilting your Large Quilts on a Domestic Sewing Machine. I had lots of fun showing you all different techniques.

To find the previous posts: Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Until next time,

JanomeGirl