Originally Posted by vegasgal47
No I didn't. In fact when I did the dashing a side came out a little longer so I trimmed the excessive.
This brings up another question. Why shouldn't you just trim off excessive? What does that do?
I already cut the shorter pieces out for the final binding. Will that mess me up if the top doesn't measure the same size as what I cut (cut piece might be longer)?
Thanks everyone for your help.
Trimming a small amount of excess may be OK, depending on your blocks. You don't want to cut the points off of stars or triangles, for example. If you have to shorten one side only, try to trim top and bottom equally while keeping your corners as square as possible.
Since you already cut the binding strips I assume you are doing 4 pieces that meet in the corner. If your strips are too short you can always switch to a continuous binding with mitered corners. There are lots of tutorials to help you do this. You will just neet to sew your binding strips together and add 1 more strip to be sure you have enough to work with. If your cut strips are longer than needed you can just shorten them.
Sometimes I get waves in my borders and have no idea why. Most of the time it comes from trying to ease or stretch one fabric to meet another. You'll know a wave when you get it because there is no way both sides of the seam will lay flat.
We all make these mistakes. Hopefully we learn from them.