Let me start out by saying, I truly hate doing hand work. I respect greatly anyone who does do any type of handwork, but me personally, I just dont have the patience to do hand work.
As such, all my quilts get bound via machine. My first ones were atrocious, but 20-30 quilts later and I am getting darned good at them.
My goal in this lovely hobby is to produce, enter and of course win at shows
and I know that shows require the binding to be hand done. It kind of got me thinking. From the information that I have read about shows and what to do for entries, I see that machine quilting is still a relatively new concept for show quilts. And many people took time and effort to make that happen. But it seems that the binding part was left out.
So was wanting to get a discussion going on what the thoughts are in our world here on machine bindings. After the practice that I have done and seeing how much I have improved. I know that my binding by machine isnt any more or less effective than hand binding is. It stands up to washing, and if done well it looks great. I always try to either blend the thread or make it stand out or even match the thread used for the quilting.
Another thought is that with the general move to more machine quilting skills/categories, why is machine binding not considered "good enough" for a show.
Thanks in advance for a good discussion on this