How many machine bind their quilts?
 

I do not like to bind my quilts. I have 9 quilts waiting to be bound. That must tell you how much I don't like binding quilts. I want to machine bind them all.

I know they don't look as good. I know that 100%. My LQS owner bound my last quilt and she machine bound it with flowers and it looked wonderful. I want to try it. It wasn't a straight stitch, so it didn't matter that it wasn't straight all the way around.

It was a wide flowery stitch, about 1/4" wide. What is your opinion? I use to hand bind years and years and years ago. I need these done by Christmas and the only way I will get them done is to machine sew them.

I even send them out to be bound (shame on me). But I want to do it myself and machine sew them. Is that so awful? The people they are going to don't quilt. So they won't know the difference.

I have done machine binding when I was on a time crunch too. Make a little practise sandwich and try a few different stitches to see what look you like. When I did mine I sewed the binding from the back first so that I was putting the decorative stitch on the top side and this let me have a little more control over the placement of the stitch (less critical on the backside). Good luck.

You could make the binding wider, like 3 inches, don't press in half but do fold in half, and sew on the back of the quilt, then flip to top and use one of the pretty stitches to stitch it down. The reason why I said wider, this way you get past the seam on the back and you won't be sewing on and off of it which does not look nice. Your stitches on top will appear on the backing. Choose a busy print and it won't be so noticeable. But, pulling the binding to the top, you will see exactly where the seam is on the backside and make sure you pull it enough over that you will be past that.

Someone else posted about not pressing the binding because the crease needs to be flexible.

A lot of times I like to make a wide backing especially when using fleece, flannel or minkee, and pull the backing to the top of the quilt and hem it down. There are several ways to decrease the bulk on the corners. You can google it if interested.

I do, almost all of mine. I use purchased bias binding a lot too. I pin everything so it comes out nice. Sew on the back side first, then wrap to the front and topstitch. I have used decorative stitches on a few, but mostly just a straight stitch.

I machine bind all the time, because my hands just can't take the hand-sewn binding. I will sew my binding to the back of the quilt & then bring it around to the front, then I topstitch at the edge of the binding using blending top & bobbin threads.

I truly admire those of you who can hand quilt!

I have tried to machine bind the quilts for the same reason, lack of time, but I am never happy with the results, compared to the hand stiching. I have a friend that uses the backing for the binding, and she does a beautiful job. I have a problem catching the quilt top, so I found if I trim the side of the quilt even, instead of leaving a quarter of an inch of batting and backing, I get better results with maching sewing, but I still am not happy with the corners, so when I can, I try to hand sew. If I sit and sew and do nothing else, I can get a full size quilt hand binded in 8-10 hours.

I hand stitch the binding on all my big quilts, but machine sew on the small charity quilts--a SID or decorative selection--yesterday I shose to SID two of them. It is faster, but I LOVE the hand work when I have time. It is so much nicer looking.

I hav always done hand binding for all my quilts - bed quilts and wall quilts, until the last queen size quilt. I was already quite tired, so I machine bound it, and voila! It looks and feels good - neat and sturdy.
I guess from now on, I may machine bind my bed quilts, but still hand bind my wall quilts.

You need to do what works for you! I'm learning there are no rules, just have fun making them.

Here is a method very similar to what I do to the corners when bringing the backing around to the front of the quilt: (the last 2 minutes of video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUn8ffH-vh8