Have you wondered how to make bias tape? Do you wish there was an easier way to make bias tape without having to cut lots of strips and sew them together? This is about the easiest way I’ve learned it! It won’t take long at all and it saves so much fabric because you don’t have to cut it on the bias! I also show you my favorite way of storing bias tape. See the details in this tutorial.
How To Make Bias Tape in one continuous piece
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Making bias tape yourself has so many advantages! See some great points here:
- It can be made to nicely match your main fabric print
- It can be made from the same type of material so your project will look professional
- It is cheaper than buying ready made bias tape
- You can use up those remnants or even fat quarters
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Gather Your Supplies to make bias tape:
- fabric (I used this pretty floral print from Robert Kaufman’s Cherry Blossom Garden Collection)
- bias tape maker tool (I alternate between by old (shown) one and this one, the Clover Bias Tape Maker)
- fabric scissors (my favorites are from Fiskars)
- lip edge ruler
- cutting mat
- rotary cutter (optional)
- straight pins (I’m in love with these heart shaped pins!)
- empty toilet paper roll
- tape
Let’s get started:
Sizing guide:
- 13.5″ square piece will yield about 73″ bias tape
- 16″ square piece will yield about 110″ bias tape
- 23″ square piece will yield about 228″ bias tape
This is your cut square fabric piece. Place it in front of you with WRONG side up and draw a straight line from one of the bottom corners to the opposite top corner. Then cut with scissors or directly on your cutting mat with lip edge ruler and rotary cutter. With your marker write an X at the top edge and one at the bottom edge of the fabric. Write an O at the side edges. This will be for matching up the edges later.
Once cut, place the pieces with right sides together, matching up the X’s and O’s.
The pieces should slightly mismatch on the top edge meaning, move the top piece ¼ inch over to the right so that the right corner hangs over and the left corner is showing the under piece.
Pin edges together and sew along dashed line. Do not serge or zigzag stitch.
Press seam open and draw lines right over the seam, with a 2 inch distance starting at the top edge.
There will be some excess on the bottom after the last line. Trim it off so that all lines have the same distance of 2”.
Now we get to sew our parallelogram (*what is that?) together to form a tube in order to cut continuous strips of fabric. Flip the piece over so that the right side of the fabric is facing you.
Fold in both short edges.
Match the drawn lines, not exactly but one row shifted down. See how it forms an uneven design, almost diagonally looking. This is necessary in order to cut strips in one piece all the way through.
One last step before we can sew these edges together. Move the top edge of the left side up ¼” so that the left sides top edge is slightly off with the line of the right side.
Click page 2 to see the next steps!
Wow, that is so awesome! I’ll have to give that a try!
this is very useful tip… thank you.
so simply and it works :0) greetings from denmark ulrike
Thanks for the great tutorial! You make it look so easy!
I’ll be trying this out next time I make bias binding. Very thorough tutorial.
Featured today, Denise…
Great tutorial! I’ve seen instructions for this process before but I must say that you have truly simplified it. Bookmarked your page; will refer to it in future… when I get myself one of those bias tape maker thingies.
I’d seen this technique before, but hadn’t tried it because it looks complicated. But you’ve made it look so easy, I can’t wait to try it out! 🙂 Lisa
Very nice but easier ways I found this very complicated. Sorry.
I just finished reading another tutorial on how to do this and ended up extremely confused. But after reading yours, it’s all clear to me! Thank you so much!!
Great tutorial- thank you!!
Thank you so much!
One quick question — can you explain briefly one small thing. Right before sewing you suggest moving the left side up so the lines are out of alignment, then when sewed they fall back into alignment. I wanted to understand a little about the why of that– is it compensating for the feed dog dragging the piece a little bit? If so, I was wondering if using a walking foot might eliminate that drag? Thanks so much
Thank you so much for checking out this post! The reason why the fabric has to be moved is because of the seam allowance. If you weren’t going to SEW, just laying the fabric edges against each other and perfectly lining up the drawn line, it would be fine. But since we are sewing the fabric together, a seam allowance will be created and the drawn lines would shift BECAUSE of the seam allowance. Then they wouldn’t line up anymore for us to cut along the line. Let me know if this will help understanding why we move the lines.
I love your tutorial! I have it saved under my Pinterest’s “sewing” category and I have come back to it frequently when needing to create my own bias binding. It is so easy to follow and it really does make a LOT of bias binding! Thanks so much for the detailed tutorial— it has been well used and appreciated!