Sewjo Saturday: Getting Ready for a Quilt Show

 It's another Sewjo Saturday at Kim's, and I have been sewing the last minute details for the quilts that I am entering in my Quilt Guild's Quilt Show coming up in a couple of weeks.  I will do another post about it when I have more time.

Every quilt entered in our show has to be quilted (not tied), bound, a sleeve for hanging, and a label.  My best friend, Terry, is a long-arm quilter. She has three of my quilts getting ready to be quilted.  She said it will be the last minute before I get my quilts, so she offered to sew the binding, the sleeves, and the labels on my quilts so that I will have time to hand stitch the things that I need to hand stitch.  What a great friend!

Today I sewed bindings for the three quilts.  I forgot to figure up how many yards of binding I made, but it's a lot.  I didn't want to just throw my binding into a bag and say "here ya go" especially after I took the time to press them.  I was trying to find a neater way to give them to her, and I came up with an idea that I thought I would share with you.

At first I was using my fingers, and it seemed to take forever, and the roll did not look circular.    I looked around (I don't remember having any empty toilet paper rolls around the house), so I found this:

 a small roller with masking tape for gathering threads from projects.   I decided that it needed something to wrap around the tape so the first part of my binding wouldn't stick and be hard to remove.  So I found a strip of fabric and I rolled it on to the roller over the tape like this:

I then took my piece of binding and started rolling. 

I rolled, and rolled, and rolled some more (this was for a queen size quilt 98x98).  Finally it looked like this:  

I gently pulled it off the roller (the piece of fabric really helped keep the binding from sticking to the roller.

Cute, huh?  You can pin the end so it doesn't unravel.

These would be so cute sitting in a jar on a shelf in my studio while waiting to return from Terry instead of waiting until the last minute to cut and sew them together.

I also made labels.

Terry can place the raw edges of the label along the raw edges of the quilt.  As she is sewing on the binding, it will cover the edges of the label and the quilt.  I can whip stitch the folded edge while I'm watching TV.   I first saw this technique here at Bonnie Hunter's website (scroll to the bottom of the page.)  Pat Sloan also has a technique, too, that you can find here.

Sewing bindings and labels is part of the quilting process.  It's the little things (and probably the most time consuming)  that help us finish our quilts.

This post is linked to Kim @My Go-Go Life

Have a great weekend!

Amanda