Part 3 DIY Baby Blanket Sewing Adventure: Adding the Binding Green Turtle Blanket

In this sewing tutorial, I’ll show you how to add binding to a baby blanket, covering essential steps like prepping the edges, creating the binding, and attaching it to finish the quilt. Whether you’re a beginner or more experienced, I’ll share helpful tips and insights into binding techniques for quilting and baby blankets. While this isn’t a full binding tutorial, it’s perfect if you want to learn how to create a quilted baby blanket with custom, handmade binding.

Transcript

Hi everyone, my name is Tre with Peace and Make, and in today’s video, we’re going to cover part three of my sewing adventure as I make a baby blanket. If you haven’t watched parts one and two yet, go ahead and check those out. In this video, we’ll be prepping the blanket for the binding, making the binding itself, and finally, you’ll get to see the finished baby blanket! I hope you enjoy today’s video.

Let’s start with a quick overview of today’s process, which you’ll see in this sketch. In part three, I’m going to add the binding around the blanket. Binding can be tricky to draw, but essentially, it’s going to go around the entire quilt, covering the edges. Sorry about my blanket lines—not the straightest, but the binding will still fit around these edges. It’s actually folded over the quilt’s edge, so the binding will cover these quilt lines, creating an inside square (or rectangle, since it’s one yard of fabric). This is the process for today’s step.

Now, I’m back for another face-over. I’ll walk you through the video clips and explain the process of making this baby blanket. Here we go!

The first thing I’m doing is cutting around the edges of the blanket to get a clean, even edge on both the top and bottom fabrics. [Music plays.] You can see the beautiful diamond pattern that formed in the quilt—I’m really excited about how it turned out! Here goes the first cut. [Music plays.]

I can definitely save that scrap fabric for something else. If you have any suggestions on what I could make with it, let me know! It’s a large piece, so I want to hold on to it for another project. [Music plays.]

The scissors were giving me a bit of trouble, so I switched to the rotary cutter, which I actually prefer. In this case, though, it was easier to use the rotary cutter because it’s much better for cutting straight lines. I use it for projects like blankets and bags, but when it comes to garments, I prefer scissors since there are more curves and small spaces to navigate.

Once I’ve finished cutting around the edges, I move on to measuring and cutting the binding. I decided to cut 4-inch wide strips of fabric for a wider binding. The tutorial I watched suggested a thinner binding, but I found 4 inches worked better for me. I’m going to fold the strips in half, like I’m showing here. When it comes time to actually sew the binding, I’ll adjust my approach a bit, but this is the general idea.

I’m a visual person, so I laid the binding against the edge of the quilt to see how the two colors work together. I really love how it looks! This also helps me visualize how wide I want the binding seam to be. In the end, I sewed a half-inch seam allowance. [Music plays.]

Now I’m showing you the yellow polka dots on the binding fabric. We’ll head over to the sewing machine because I need to connect the strips of fabric into one long, continuous piece. To do that, I’m stitching from corner to corner, as you can see in the video. Just a heads up: this video is more of a general overview of the process, not a full binding tutorial.

If you’d like to see a complete binding tutorial, let me know in the comments, and I can make that! I’m definitely planning to do one in the future. If I included a full binding tutorial here, this video would be twice as long. I had a lot of fun making the binding, though! For a long time, I bought pre-made binding for my garments, but I needed a lot of it for this project, so I had to learn how to make it myself. Now that I know how, I’m excited to make even more!

At this point, I’m sewing the binding strips together. I’m also ironing the binding in half, so it stays in place while I sew it down. You don’t want to constantly pinch the fabric together while sewing, so ironing it really helps. [Music plays.] Look how pretty that looks!

Now I’m going to start attaching the binding to the blanket. I’m calling this my “sewing adventure” because this is my first time making a baby blanket using these techniques. I’m still figuring things out, but it’s been so much fun. I’ll be posting more videos of the other baby blankets I made, so stay tuned for that!

Here, I’m starting the binding process. I created a little “envelope” with the binding so that the other end of it will fit right into that space. This will help make the mitered corners, which is actually a pretty fun step.

I’ve skipped a few steps, but don’t worry—if you want to see a detailed binding tutorial, let me know. The next step is folding the binding over to the back side of the blanket, where I’ll stitch in the ditch to secure the binding. [Music plays.] You can see me here, folding the binding over and stitching it down.

By the way, you can also catch a glimpse of my arms in this video. It reminds me of when I made my first button-up shirt. I messed up the center front, but instead of redoing it, I repurposed it into another project. Now it’s a cozy shirt that I still love!

Back to the blanket: I’m stitching the binding down and it looks absolutely beautiful. I’m so happy with how it turned out! The binding really finishes the quilt off nicely. [Music plays.] Here’s a close-up of the finished product.

And now for the final reveal! You can still see the faint marks I made to guide the binding, but once you iron it, they’ll disappear. It’s looking so good! [Music plays.]

And that’s it for the first baby blanket! This is the final part of the three-part series, so if you haven’t already, be sure to check out parts one and two for a full overview of the project. I hope this video helps with your own sewing projects.

As I mentioned, the binding part wasn’t a full tutorial, but I’ll be happy to do a more in-depth one if you’re interested! If you liked this video and my other content, please subscribe and like the video to help me reach more people. The more likes, the more the algorithm will share it, so others can learn about sewing and how to create beautiful things with their sewing machines!

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye! [Music fades out.]