Sewing the binding and making a hanging sleeve with DecoBob

Happy Boxing Day!

Since we were all spoiled yesterday and I’m officially sick of shopping, I’m not going anywhere near the Boxing Day sales today. Instead, I’ll spend some of the day in my quilting studio finishing my peony quilt. Today, I’ll be trimming the quilt, sewing the binding and making a hanging sleeve with DecoBob thread.

Making the binding

Usually when I’m making binding for my quilts, I try to use a thread that matches the fabric, so when I press the binding seams open, I won’t notice the stitches.Today, I’m going to use my DecoBob thread to sew the binding strips together. I talked about how to make quilt binding in previous posts, such as those that I did in October. As you can see from the photo, the stitches that I did using the DecoBob are invisible! The only thing you have to watch when using this thread is that you need to backstitch at the beginning and end of the seam.

Making the hanging sleeve

Many of the quilts I make are intended to be used as wallhangings, so I’ve got a pretty good system that I always use when making the hanging sleeves for these quilts. Here is my step-by-step visual guide to making hanging sleeves:

Now to sew on the binding

Now that the sleeve is pinned onto the back of the quilt and our binding is made, we can sew it onto the quilt. Working from the front, align all of the raw edges of the quilt and binding and sew the binding to all four edges of the quilt. I explained all of this back in my October posts.

For most of my previous projects, I stitched the binding to the back of the quilts using a decorative machine stitch.This is an easy and fast way to get a binding sewn on, and is especially good for quilts that will be washed a lot (such as baby quilts). But, this quilt will only be hung on the wall and I want to stitch the back of the binding by hand. In the past I have always used cotton thread that I’ve matched to the color of the binding. But, today, I’m going to try using DecoBob for the hand stitching. I try to use a double strand of thread when stitching down binding, just to make it that much stronger, so I’m going to cut off a long piece of DecoBob and knot the two ends together after threading my needle.

Time to watch a movie

Lots of people hate sewing on bindings, but I also know many people who absolutely love it – I have to say I’m somewhere in the middle on this topic. It’s a nice, thoughtless activity to do while watching a good show on TV. So, I put on a good Christmas movie to watch with my family and got my hand stitching done. After finishing the binding, I also stitched down the folded edge of the hanging sleeve.

The finished product

Well, I’m happy to say that my second UFO is now finished! Thanks to WonderFil, I was able to finish my peony quilt using all of the threads left over from previous projects. Sewing the binding and making a hanging sleeve with DecoBob gave me great results and I think that I’ll use my DecoBob threads for these jobs over and over again. Thanks for joining me this week and I hope you have a happy and healthy New Year!!