Phyllis, Thank you so much.
My experiment making a table runner is finished. It consists of five 12 inch square blocks. They were made when I was first learning how to piece.
My quilting consists of diagonal squares in the center part, and long curvy work done on the borders.
Since I still am having troubles with free motion quilting, I just used a regular foot, with the feed dogs up on the machine.
I carefully moved the fabric sandwich along the curved lines I drew on the fabric with a heat erasable pen. I think the curved lines came out fairly nicely for never having done anything like this before on a quilt.
Making the binding strips wasn't a problem, which I was happy accomplishing without the problems on my previous attempts. But when I got to the joining of the ends, I just couldn't figure things out, even aver watching several videos, and trying to duplicate what I saw..
The problem probably was caused by my bad memory. I had forgotten how wide my binding strips had to be, so I made it two inches. I then laid it down on the edge of the quilt top, and sewed a quarter inch seam along the edge to bind it to the sandwich.
After that I pressed the binding fabric over.
Then I turned it all over, and folded what fabric was left in half, and then folded that onto the bottom of the quilt sandwich.
I sewed the binding onto the bottom. I left one foot between the ends of the binding. That's when I couldn't figure out how to join the two ends. I ended up just doing a straight 90 degree stitch, instead of the bias 45 degree stitch that was required.
The corners also suffered because of my bad memory.
I went back to YouTube, and finally found a video that I think I understand, and discovered how bad my memory was. I guess you have to do this binding thing quite a lot before the technique stays in your memory.
Even with the myriad of imperfections and mistakes, I still like the results. It's not something I would gift to another person, but it will work just fine along my old dresser top.