I have always wondered why it was "expected" that "real" quilts would have the binding stitched by hand. For most of us, everything on a quilt is done by machine. Why all of a sudden at the finish line, are we suppose to hand stitch? I am quite capable of handstitching, I have the skills and the physical ability to do so but it just has never made sense to me. No one that I have ever gifted a quilt to has ever even mentioned the binding. It would take several hours to handstitch the binding on a king sized quilt, it wouldn't be as strong and no one on my list of quilt receivers would even notice or care so I'm not doing it! I'd rather use that extra time to start a new quilt.