I'm going to see how it goes this time. The quilt is strangely square this time. I think it was the way I measured and cut the borders because there was a lot of wonkyness in the blocks themselves. I did a bunch of easing so I'm surprised.

Normally, I would just put the leftover fabric back in my stash but I heavily starched the entire length of fabric and I don't want to have starched fabric hanging around in my stash.

One thing to be particularly careful of due to the longer strips of fabric between the joining seams in lengthwise grain binding...plan it out so your seams do not wind up in the corners. It can mess up the miters and/or just not look as 'polished'.

I don't think it matters really. They say bias bindings hold up better - and if you're doing a scalloped border then a straight grain border won't be stretchy enough to go around the curves so you'll have to do bias binding, but for a regular square or rectangular quilt I think you're fine. I have quilts that have been washed a hundred times in the washer and tossed in the dryer afterwards and their straight grain bindings are still holding up strong. (Doesn't matter if it's lengthwise or selvage to selvage, it's still straight of grain.) I can't say that it will live a hundred years after me, but I won't be around to be heartbroken about it. ;)

Thanks, Ghostrider. I didn't really even think about that.

I have not had any problems using length of grain for binding. If I am dealing with a lot of yardage I subdivide it into 45" - 60" lengths by clipping and ripping. If I subdivide to around 45" I will have no more seams in my binding than if I had cut crosswise and it is an easy amount of fabric to deal with.

You can use the lengthwise cut fabric for binding, but you may find that there is less "give" as you do your binding so it may be a bit harder to use. Most of the time I use bias binding as I like working with that the best.

The only difference would be the price of possibly using more yardage by going lengthwise instead of across. There would be more stretch in a crosswise cut as well.

It makes no difference. Sometime length is good if you are following a pattern in the fabric that is printed longwize. In these cases or even on the width it looks better to cut with the design and not with the grain.

You only need to cut binding on the bias is you are going around a curve. I just took a class at Raleigh sewing/quilt expo and one of the teachers there has a site that has the most watched video on the internet about binding. It's quilttv.com,