Baby Blanket and Booties Segment 4

Well, an ongoing issue with my project has been my sewing machine.  Yes, that fight continues.  So I figured that I haven't used a machine on this project so far, so never mind the machine, I will do it by hand.

Strangely, when adding a binding to a knitted piece, it seems to easy in my mind.  In reality I'm dealing with very fluid knitting and a stretchy soft fabric.  Not like nice, stiff cotton with straight lines at all, ha, ha.  Making a quilt is much easier I must admit.

Here's where I'm at at this very moment, so you can see the "process".  The steps involved are almost funny.  

Step One: Folding the stretchy fabric in half. Normally When doing this with a machine I would take one end and sew it to the edge and iron it all in place and pin it then sew the other half under the binding by hand.  I tried that by hand and because of the fluid motion of the knitting it was coming out crooked.

So I tried folding the piece in half and sewing the cut edge of the fabric to the edge of the knitting. 

Step Two: Sewing the cut edge of the fabric to the edge of the knitting.  This is pretty easy and shouldn't take too long to go all the way around the piece.

As you can see, it looks pretty good and it doesn't matter if the fabric has that "twisted" look because it is so stretchy that will work itself out during the next step.

Step Three: Finding the middle and pulling the fabric down each side of the edge and sewing that together.

This part isn't too hard if you pin it in small workable sections at a time.  The best part of the stretchy fabric is that it IS stretchy and can be stretched to make each side equal.  

After all, both sides of the knitting look the same so why not have the binding look equal as well?

A nice close up of how to get it sewn together once everything is pinned in place.  

It is time consuming, but in the end it looks lovely.

I still want to sew the edges of the binding with a machine, but I'm pretty sure that once it's finished by hand I will change my mind and leave it as is.





So, that's where I'm at with the blanket!  It looks beautiful with the binding and I'm glad I decided to do it this way.  It adds a little something to it and gives it a "finished" look.  I know I could have knitted some kind of edge to it, but this really is a better way to keep the edges from fraying and hiding those pesky yarn ball changes.

Until next time.....