quick quilt binding q--

anyone have a link for one of those charts that tells you how big to make the square ( that you split and sew into a tube) if you how wide and how much binding you need?

thanks

Penny S

Reply to
Penny S
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Penny, are you talking about bias binding?

Here's a site:

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Hope this helps!

Karen Maslowski in Cincinnati

Reply to
SewStorm

SewStorm murmured while asleep:

yes thanks.... ( realizing those wall hangings should have been boudn and mailed weeks ago...P

Penny S

Reply to
Penny S

Oops, hope it goes fast!

Remember, this method of binding makes way more than you think it will. Good luck.

Karen Maslowski in Cincinnati

Reply to
SewStorm

The piece needn't be square -- I find rectangles much easier to handle because the seams don't intersect at the corners.

Multiply your length by your width, then divide the result by the width of the cloth you are using, and you'll know how long a piece to cut.

For example, if you want eighteen yards of two-inch binding, you will need thirty-six yard-inches of fabric. If the fabric is fifty inches wide, you will need thirty-six fiftieths of a yard, which is .72 yards -- three fourths would do.

Note how the inches divide out: an inch per inch is one.

You could end up with mixed units like cubit-yards per meter, in which case you'd have to multiply by one: multiplying a number of cubit-yards per meter by .9144 meters per yard would give you the answer in cubits.

If you absolutely must have a square, calculate the area in square units and then take the square root. There is a key on most calculators for taking square roots.

To calculate the area, convert the length and width into the same unit: for the example given, I could call eighteen yards of two-inch binding 648 inches by two inches, which would be 1296 square inches. The square root of 1296 square inches is 36 inches.

Or I could call two inches one eighteenth of a yard, and get one square yard.

Joy Beeson

Reply to
joy beeson

Now you're giving me a headache and I'm thinking that you also need to square the pi of the hippopotamus. Or something.

Reply to
Me

Re: quick quilt binding q--

Reply to
sewingbythecea

method B make a big square of continuous binding. Hope you make enough. Found out you made way more than you need. Bind quilt, put excess in a bag. Stash bag. 2 years later when you are cleaning out the sewing room throw big bag of binding out. 6 month after that, need that exact color. Make big square......

Penny S

Reply to
Penny S

That's my method!!!

Reply to
Me

ROFLOL!! Been there, done that.

Karen Maslowski in Cincinnati

Reply to
SewStorm

You lack pack-rat genes! My box of bias tapes includes a triangle of the black, eighth-inch cotton gingham I used to test my first drafted-from-scratch pattern in 1965.

My usual method is to search the scraps for something that's already cut on the bias.

Puzzled query from a non-quilter: why is it that quilts are bound with bias? I'd expect straight strips to be easier to install as well as easier to cut, unless the edge of the quilt is scalloped.

Tangent: I have a housewife found among my grandmother's things that was bound with a strip of straight linen even though the end of he case is sharply curved. Photo at

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Joy Beeson

Reply to
joy beeson

Then do it the other way: ask yourself how many two-inch strips a foot long you could cut from a one-foot square. The square will yield about the same length of two-inch bias tape.

Joy Beeson

Reply to
joy beeson

joy beeson murmured while asleep:

bias edges wear better, longer, stronger.

Penny S

Reply to
Penny S

Is there a child here that could open this aspirin bottle for me?

Reply to
Me

All this reminds me of a joke.

Down at the hardware store, a "yard" is the yard appropriate to the item being sold. If you buy a "yard" of rope, you get a linear yard, if you buy a "yard" of concrete, you get a cubic yard.

So DH and I were talking past each other for quite a while when I talked about buying yards of cloth -- something used by the area is just naturally sold in square yards, so what do you mean by saying that 72" muslin at $10/yard is cheaper than 36" muslin at $6/yard?

He still thinks that selling fabric by the linear yard is a silly way to go about it. I don't think that I'll tell him that at fabric.com, a "yard" is really a meter.

====================================

Now I'm getting determined; I used to teach Algebra, there must be some way I can explain bias tape.

Starting at the basics: are you familiar with the concept of measuring area in square units?

A square scrap that's one inch on each side has an area of one square inch; a scrap half an inch wide and two inches long also has an area of one square inch, as you can see by cutting it in half and placing the two halves side by side on top of the first scrap.

Exercise: if you have half a yard of fifty-inch fabric, it measures eighteen inches by fifty inches. The area is eighteen inches times fifty inches, which is 900 square inches.

Variant exercise: The same half yard of fifty-inch fabric measures half a yard by 1.39 yards. The area is .69 square yards.

Or, working it in common fractions: It measures 1/2 yard by

50/36 yards. Half of 50/36 is 25/36, so the piece is twenty-five thirty-sixths of a square yard: it will give you the same amount of bias tape as a piece a yard wide and twenty-five inches long. 25/36 = 0.69444444444444444, which agrees with the result above, so I haven't dropped any decimals.

If any of the above is the tiniest bit fuzzy, hit "post follow-up message" now, do not read the rest of this message.

====================================

In grammar school I was taught to change everything into the same units before calculating. In college, I was taught that one can often save a great deal of time by leaving the units as is, letting each intermediate result be whatever weird unit the calculation comes out in, and then at the end change the units into something useful.

This habit also serves as a check on calculation -- if you want to find out how long something is, and your answer comes out in quarts per second, then you've goofed somewhere along the way.

I think that including this simplification in my original explanation is what confused many of you so I'm going to do everything the long way from here on down.

If this section confuses you, just go on to the next section and pretend I left this one out.

====================================

Working backward, let me explain the post to which Me responded.

Cutting a piece of fabric into strips does not change its area. (Sewing it back together does cost the seam allowances, but let's ignore that for now, eh?)

If you make a piece of fabric into tape, the tape will have the same area as the fabric, no matter whether you cut on-grain strips of uniform length or bias strips of varying length. Two strips which have the same area and the same width are going to have the same length.

So if you cut a piece of fabric into straight-grain tape, the tape will be the same length as bias tape of the same width made from the same fabric. (Well, you'll lose more fabric to seams in the bias tape than in the straight-grain tape, but we agreed to ignore that.)

Since it is easy to figure out how much crossgrain tape you can get out of a piece of fabric, I suggested figuring that out so as to know how much bias tape a given piece of fabric would make.

If this section is fuzzy, erase both it and the post it purports to explain. I'll repeat anything important.

==================================== SUMMARY:

The area of a rectangle is the length times the width.

If both lengths are measured with the same unit, the answer comes out in square units: square inches, square centimeters, square meters, etc.

Aside from seam-allowance loss, cutting up a piece of fabric and sewing it back together does not change its area.

If you are quite clear on these three points, read on -- otherwise, click "post follow-up" and tell me where you fell overboard.

====================================

The original question was: if you know how long and wide a piece of bias tape you want, how big a piece of fabric should you cut into bias strips?

The area of the bias strip is its length times its width. You want to cut up a piece with at least that much area.

I suppose the rather curious custom of cutting up a square

-- which I've seen in several places -- is based on the ease of the calculations:

Example: I want ten yards of two-inch tape. 10 X 36 = 360 X 2 = 720

26.832815 -- a 27" square should do the job.

Same example expanded: 10 yards times 36 inches/yard is 360 inches long. Multiply this length by the width, 2 inches. The area of the tape is 720 square inches.

The square root of 720 is 26.832815, so a twenty-seven-inch square should be slightly larger than the desired tape.

====================================

If any rectangle will do, there is no clear result. To get

720 square inches, you could use two yards of ten-inch fabric, or ten inches of 72" fabric, or one yard of 20" fabric, or twenty inches of 36" fabric, or sixteen inches of 45" fabric . . .

On the other hand, if you are buying fabric to make the tape, using a rectangle simplifies things marvelously. You just write on your shopping list that you need 720 square inches , put your calculator in your pocket, go to the shop, select a fabric, note that it's marked 39 inches wide, whip out your pocket tape measure to make sure it's not mis-marked, divide 720 square inches by 39 inches, get 18.46 inches, note that this is slightly more than half a yard, and buy 5/8 yard -- or three fourths, if you think it might be cut crooked.

Then at home you wash it thoroughly, straighten the ends, cut it on the true bias from cut-edge to cut edge, sew the selvages together, draw lines two inches apart parallel to the bias edges -- there's another reason for buying a bit extra: you might well end up with a strip of 1.5" tape at one end of the parallelogram -- sew the crossgrain edges together offset so that the cutting lines join together into one spiral line (being VERY careful that the cutting lines cross at the seam line, NOT at the cut edge), press the seam, and cut along the line that spirals around the tube.

In the example given, the crossgrain seam will spiral around the tube of fabric more than once, which makes it hard to pin and hard to press. It might be well to cut the piece in half along one of the cutting lines, sew two of the crossgrain edges together with the bias edges matched, then sew the remaining two crossgrain edges with an offset seam.

Joy Beeson

Reply to
joy beeson

Thank you. Even those of us who are mathematically challenged (hey, they told me I couldn't learn math because I was a girl) followed that.

I was taught to sew the fabric into a tube, making sure that it followed the bias, so that you just cut round and round, ending up with one long strip of bias tape already seamed.

Reply to
Me

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