Originally Posted by gail-r
Originally Posted by shaverg
I tear length wise all the time does not hurt the fabric and you donot need to cut after you do it. I tear all my borders long strips, and backing. Have for 27 years, without one distortion.
I have always been afraid to tear my borders, especially border prints even though I buy quality quilting fabric. I've seen many times that the designs aren't always printed straight on the fabric, so I wondering what kind of fabric you usually use? I could save a lot of time if I could tear my borders. Does it make a difference if you are doing mitered border corners? Do you get good mitered corners with torn fabric?
I tear borders for a fussy tear too. I get the exact design equal on each side. The last fabric I tore was my Bay cotton kona floral. I am attaching two quilt where all the strips and borders were torn, you can see a close up of the border. You can tell how straight they are by looking at the pattern. The baseball fabric is Alexander Henry. Both are very good fabric. The better the fabric the easier tear. If you see a strip on my quilt no matter how small it was probably torn. Even some of my blocks are torn. Length wise is much better. You can do selvage to selvage, but much harder. You will get some thread, but for me has never been that big of an issue with the accuracy I get. Even the beige baseball sashings were torn and then cut to length. They came out the exact 2.1/2 width, exact.