quiltbabe

Laying out the quilt top for basting usually lets me know where it all went wrong! Like this last quilt I'm now quilting. Somehow I had the borders way off. That doesn't happen too often, thankfully. Fixed it so it was nice and flat and square before basting. So I guess you could say I square up before quilting. Then after quilting, I use my rulers to make sure the corners and sides are nice and straight and square. As you know, sometimes quilting gets it out of line, stretches a little here and there. So with my rulers, I find the square corners, straight edges and mark it with a pencil. The pencil line is like your cut line, but, like nancyw in her comment, having the extra batting and backing gives the feed dogs something to hold on to and completely fills the binding all around the quilt. Before I did it this way, despite all my efforts, sometimes there would be less full areas of my binding. After sewing the binding on, I use my ruler/rotary cutter to cut the excess batting and backing off, which goes straight to my stash! On a side note, if my quilting design doesn't go off the edges, I baste the edges to hold them securely for the binding. Thankfully, there are no quilt police to judge us! Or I would get busted alot!