Tara's Favorite Bag - binding on pocket pieces

Well, I will be showing you today how I am putting binding on my two 6x18" outside pockets. I took a few pictures and will be showing you how to put binding on, totally by machine.

On the smaller inside pockets, I am putting binding on all four sides, so I will treat those like I do my full size quilts, sew the binding on the right side of the quilt first, then turn it over and stitch the backside of the binding by hand. I find this is the easiest and neatest way to do it since I'll be turning corners and turning corners on the machine be tricky.

For the large pockets, we are putting binding only on the top and the bottom, and the sides will be covered in the seam of the bag so there is no need to bind the short sides.

To start with, I sew the binding on the right side of the pocket, with raw edges matching.


Then, I fold the binding over, and pin it from the right side. It might be seem more natural to pin from the back, but the purpose of pinning from the front is so that when you are stitching, you will be able to remove the pins easily as the needle comes close to them.

You can see both the front and back sides of the pinning in this picture.


I then stitch very closely in the ditch in the crease between the front of the pocket and the binding.

In this picture I had stopped just before a pin to take the picture, but before I started sewing again, I removed the pin.

So there you have it. At the end of this step, we'll have binding on the two long sides of the two large outside pockets. You'll also need binding on all four sides of the 3 smaller pockets.