 Hi you guys, Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel, Inside the Hymn. So we're talking about bias binding today, which is a little bit of a misnomer. So there is something called bias tape that is used in garment making. You can use it to finish necklines, hems of any kind, any raw edges on the like an unlined garment. And the bias tape is truly cut on the bias on a 45 degree angle. So it has the most stretch that that woven fabric can possibly have. Now the other side of that is something called binding. Sometimes it's called blanket binding bias binding. You guys in the quilting world know exactly what I'm talking about. And that is whenever you are binding the raw edges of something that is completely straight, does not need to stretch, does not need to move, you're not going to be wearing it like a quilt, like this ribbon basically that we're doing. Any kind of like home craft like that you would use like in bag making for example, some bags have curves and so you might want to use actual bias tape for that. But for anything that's super, super straight and you don't need it to go around a curve, you don't need it to stretch and move, you can just use the straight of grain of your fabric. Okay, and if you do need to make actual bias tape words cut along the 45 degree angle, here is the easiest way to make a lot of bias tape really, really easily. It's called continuous bias tape. And it starts with half a yard of fabric. So I'm just cutting this to 18 inches, which is half a yard, like so, we'll use that for some other scrap. And then what you want to do next is open this guy up. And you're going to start marking your fabric. So we're not going to be cutting it. We're actually going to be marking it. And I'm just trying to grab some kind of marker that's going to show up. I am just using this for demonstration purposes, obviously. So using a purple marker probably won't be that big of a deal. But you just start and your clear see through quilting ruler is going to have a line that says 45 degrees on it. So you want to match that up with a raw edge, like so, and then start drawing in your lines. Now for one inch bias tape, we want two inch wide lines. So that's what we're going to do. If you're doing anything smaller, then you'll need to make your the width of your bias tape smaller as well. And once you've reached the other corner, that is where you were going to stop. We're actually going to cut that piece away, my fabric and all my lines. And I'm taking this line here at the corner. And I am marrying it up to this second line here. So not this line, but this second line here. And you marry that up together and you get the edges, the raw edges together, and you're going to be making like kind of an X shape with the with the lines making like an X over each other. And they should be intersecting at your quarter inch seam allowance. And then you just keep now you're going to keep all the lines in order all the way down. And essentially you're making a really catty wampus tube. It's like a tube that's kind of crooked. So you can see we've got this and it's kind of wanting to twist around and that's okay. Go to your sewing machine and you're going to stitch your quarter inch seam allowance all along this raw edge. Okay, so we've got that also we're going to take out our pins and you're going to see exactly what we've been able to make here, which is one long strip of bias tape. Because you take your scissors and starting at one end, you start cutting along your lines. And you can see once you get back around to your sewn raw edges, now we're one line in. So essentially what we've done is created like a spirally situation. And when you cut through all of it, you will have miles and miles of bias tape. I'm going to take us around to the intersection one more time just to show you guys that now we're in another line. Cool, right? And again, all of this is cut on the actual bias. It's 45 degrees. So you've got a lot of, you know, stretch in the fabric, which is nice. And this is what all of your intersections look like. It's really beautiful. You're going to want to press those obviously and you just keep going around and around. You've got a ton of true bias binding. So how you get the bias binding or blanket binding or bias tape or whatever we're calling it to be folded in a way where it wraps around the raw edges of your fabric. And this is with bias and garment making as well as blanket binding anything on the straight edge. You need to fold in both of the raw edges and then you fold that in again and you make like this little like book type of situation. There are a lot of ways to do it. You can do it just the old fashioned way and measure it and press each fold that you need to put in there as you go. There are also tools that can help you. So I have some of these Pauline's Quilters World Dressmaker Sashers. I'm pretty sure I got these from Nancy's Notions, but basically it is this little plastic tool and you feed your fabric up through one and through the other and it automatically folds in your fabric for you. So you pull the fabric through the tool and press as you go and pull and press and pull and press. So that's one way to do it. The way that I have to do it, I hope that you guys aren't mad at me, but it is expensive. It was one of those things that I saw and I just said I have to have that. I don't care what it costs. So simplicity years ago made something called a bias tape maker and it's this really clever tool that you wrap your fabric around this spool. The spool is threaded through a bias tape making contraption and then that is pushed through like basically an iron and it comes out the other end completely pressed and folded just like you need it to. It's automatic, done by a machine. You don't need your iron at all and it's awesome. The problem is simplicity discontinued this machine sometime along the way. It used to cost 20 or 30 dollars. Now you cannot find it on Amazon or on eBay for anything less than 100, 150 dollars. I think I did an eBay bid and got mine for like 130 which is insane. It's one of those things that I sort of feel ashamed that I spent that much money on it but the more I use it, the more use I get out of it and the more I see how it's made that task so much easier it feels like more and more of a justified purchase. I have no idea why they would discontinue this. I have no idea why nobody else has recreated it. I don't know if there are like patents or what's going on but somebody out there needs to make some of these, make them affordable for all of you so that you can get them to. They're really really really great. So if you've got some like lotto money or I don't know like you found money in your jacket pocket like we do every winter maybe try and splurge on this bias tape making machine. It is truly awesome. I can 100% vouch for it. I really really love it and it makes quick painless work of making bias binding which is kind of annoying to do any other way but once you get your bias tape made then you need to run it through your machine and again there are a couple of ways that you can do that as well. You can do it again the old fashion way where you unfold all of your bias tape you sew it flat on the right side of your project whatever you're doing and you sew along that first fold and you flip it over and around the raw edge and then you stitch in the ditch all the way down catching the other side of the bias tape on the bottom side of your project. There are also bias tape feet for your sewing machine. There's one that actually I saw somebody using on television on like I don't know the one of the PBS shows where you can take your flat, un-pressed bias tape feed it through the machine through the foot and the foot does all the work for you. Maybe Angela Wolfe was using it I don't know did you guys have you guys seen that and that seemed pretty foolproof. I haven't had a lot of success with that with my brother maybe if you have one of those super high-end machines that does a better job of it than mine does but I ended up using the bias tape foot where you need the fabric already pressed and you just feed the fabric through the middle and the bias tape gets sandwiched like this and the foot feeds everything through at the same time and the same rate um so it's just one stitch all the way down. The downside to both of those sewing machine feet is that you will see a row of stitching if you do it the original way then you stitch in the ditch and you only see the stitching on the back side so for any um if you're doing any um seams that are going to show like on an unlined garment maybe you want to opt for the two-seamed option that takes longer and not take the shortcut with your foot it's really up to you and how you want to do it but once you're done with all of that then voila you have completely bound your project and there are no raw edges so that's the 411 on bias binding um it looks great like I said in an unlined garment it looks great you know as my little up-cycled fabric busting uh garland that I made and a lot of different other applications where you just don't want to hem or surging would be a little too raw and rustic you can do it this way as well that's gonna do it for me today thank you all so much for watching and I will see you back here very soon where I promise you I'm making clothes too I know it seems like a crazy it's just a crazy time of the year I've got a lot of ideas and a lot of things going on but clothes are happening as well I promise so I'll see you soon bye