Making a borderless quilt...Need Tips Please
 

I've recently notice that there's a trend towards borderless quilts and frankly, I really like them. However, I can see some potential problems arising from not having a border to help fudge the squaring up, or keeping the seams from unraveling. I'm sure there are other issues that I haven't thought of yet. Any tips out there?

Thanks, Cindy

To help with the seams stability, I do a staystitching just inside the ¼" mark around the full quilt top.

I had some of the same fears you do. I just did one once and it worked out fine. I do my own quilting. I try to keep the kids quilt to one width of fabric and often adding a border would make it too big. You can always backspace at the end of a row if you are worried about the seams coming out. Mine are charity quilts made out of simple patterns and do not really need squaring up.

a good "borderless" quilt look is the On Point setting. the side triangles sort of give the eye more to see and makes all blocks look great.

This is what I do, as well. I do an edge stitching and then trim my edge neatly, after the quilting. The stitching also helps keep the edge of the sandwich together, making it easier to bind.

I've navigated toward the no borders quilts. I guess it just depends on the quilt pattern. The staystiching works well or if you're from the old school, like me, backstitching does the trick. Happy quilting!

With a lot of charity quilts and not enough fabric, I went borderless with my quilts over 10 years ago. Never had a problem but the basting might help you. Nothing to fear.

If your blocks have pieces that have points on the edge of the quilt, and the quilt is not *square*, squaring it up could lose the points. Also need to be careful when sewing the binding on to make sure you place the binding well to make all the points "point".

First thing I do after the top is complete is to stitch around the entire top, 1/4", or 1/8" from edge. This way, I know that whenever I get back to it to finish it, none of my seams will have come undone.

That's an interesting tip...thanks.

Thank you to everyone else too. I think that I'm most worried about lopping off my points. I suppose that I could make the quilt top slightly larger, so that when I go to trim and sew on binding, the points are preserved. I would imagine that squaring up could be a nightmare, if it wasn't squared several times along the way. Maybe I should make something that doesn't involve points along the edge.

~ C