Cornered

Yesterday I had some errands to run in the morning. When I came home, I wasted no time taking a nap. Do you feel let down and tired after Christmas? No doubt, I'm just getting old, but it seems there's a lot of build up for the holiday, and then a sharp drop-off in energy afterward. So I just listened to my tired bones and snuggled up under a flannel quilt for a nap. And I had a furry companion in the ample form of Gracie to keep me company. She's an excellent nap cat, and she loves her flannel.

When I woke up, I decided it was time to get going on the binding for the Heart of the Home table runner.

There were some questions in my feeble mind about how to do this because I've never bound a quilt with more than four corners and angles at anything other than 90°. "How hard could it be?" I asked myself. Well, not hard, but I quickly discovered that there was more to it than meets the eye. Fortunately, I learned this after doing it incorrectly around just one corner. It was apparent this dog was going to have to learn a new trick. 

So I turned to my new best friend, Google, and was immediately confronted with the first question along the way. How does one search for such a thing? And I have to tell you that I'm simply amazed at the utter gibberish one can type into the search box and come up with something downright intelligible. I started out with "binding a quilt with corners different from ninety degrees." And I came up with a lot of tutorials about binding quilts, but only one that was instructive about what I wanted to do. "Instructive", yes, but helpful, no. Nevertheless, it did give me a new search term that got me where I wanted to go: "Binding a quilt with odd angles". As it turns out "odd angles" is the key. I came up with this very helpful video from Marcie Baker.

If you can't see the video, click right here. Isn't the internet a marvelous thing? I'm almost happy to be old enough to remember encyclopedias (and to know the song Jiminy Cricket used to sing to teach kids how to spell "encyclopedia"). Allow me to digress for a moment to illustrate how amazing the internet is by actually posting Jiminy Cricket, because everyone should know him and his song. He is ageless.

Here's the link if you need it.

Ahem. Can you tell I was procrastinating on those corners? Anyway, so I was also happy for an iPad that allowed me to bring the video right to my sewing machine so that I could keep replaying it as I went. And there you go, mitered corners on my corner with an angle greater than 90°. Here's how it looks from the top:

It worked out, although when I did the hand-sewing, I was guilty of over-thinking it a bit. Here's how it looks from the back. I had a little trouble getting the edges of the binding to meet up, but it's good enough. And who but the quilt police will be looking anyway?

And so here it is, my 22nd completed quilt for 2013.

It looks pretty on my table, and it's a good size as well. So bring on Valentine's Day...or maybe we should get through New Year's Day first. Either way, I'm ready.

Updated to say that I'll be linking up to:

and to Slow Sunday Stitching:

Today Mike and I are going to take advantage of a sale on storage containers going on at our local megamart. He's looking for some of those shoebox sized ones to use in the camper. I'm looking for some about twice that size for larger quilting projects. I have so many projects going on right now that I need more storage bins for them. Go figure. We're also hoping to replace the plastic trash can that holds our bird seed...the ones the squirrels chewed through last summer.

And speaking of new projects, don't forget that the last NewFO Challenge linky party goes live on Tuesday. I'm giving away the last little needle nanny, so don't miss out!

I hope you have a restful weekend. Do lots of sewing if you can.