A Tale of Binding

Oh, I just have to laugh!  Today I took on my least favorite quilting task - that of binding.  I need to explain why I dislike doing something that others love because, for them, it represents the completion of a project.  For me, it represents a barrier between one project and the siren song of a new one.  Friends say they love the soothing nature of the hand-sewing that is part of this task, and they are surprised that I, who love hand sewing, dislike this.  My response is that I practice hand sewing as a part of the creative process not as a tedious, "required" non-creative part - like writing footnotes.  By the way, as another note of explanation, I like to have quilts finished; I just don't enjoy the finishing

Well, anyway, I was determined to make and attach a hanging sleeve and bind a very small wall hanging.  It's one I really like and would be happy to have it finished so it could be displayed.  The fabric for the binding was the same as the background material, and there wasn't much left.  In order to stretch the amount of fabric, I planned to include as part of the binding two strips of 13" each.  They are composed of small pieces of the various other fabrics that make up the focal elements in the wall hanging.  In order to use those two strips, they had to be sandwiched between two pieces of the background fabric. That was easy enough to do.

The difficulty arose when I realized that the colorful strips had to wind up on the right side of the quilt!  Sound easy?  It isn't!  Quilters will understand.  Binding consists of fabric that is two and a quarter inches wide which is then folded in half.  It is sewed on to the quilt by machine with right sides together.  In short, the colorful bit of the shouldn't show when the binding is attached to the wall hanging.  

Okay.  In order to do all that and do it correctly, I had to take my brain out, dust it off, turn it up-side down, and backwards before returning it to my empty head.  Clearly, I didn't do that correctly because not only did I not get it right the first time, I didn't get it right the second time I tried.  And if that weren't enough, I didn't get it right the third time either!  Finally, because of the way I sewed the binding, I had to sew it on the back of the quilt.  That's a no no.  

Too bad.  That's the only way it'll work on this wall hanging.  It also means that the hand sewing part of the binding will be on the front so I darn well better do a really, really good job of it!