Quilting Borders: How to Miter Corners the EASY Way

Hi, I'm Mary from Joyful and Merry Quilting. Today's quilting tip, I am going to show you how to miter the corners of your quilt top. There is an easier way to do this and I am going to show you how. It's not difficult. It's not scary. It goes together quickly with the tips that I'm going to offer you. All you'll need, go ahead and gather your tools. You'll need an iron. You'll need your cutter. You'll need some flathead pins. I like the magic pins. You'll need some kind of a marking tool. You'll need your ruler. You'll need some pressing solution and you'll need your quilt top and borders. So let's get started and miter these corners. If you like this video, please click like. Click subscribe so that you'll see more of the tips that we have to offer. I am going to show you how to create the perfect mitered corner for your borders on your quilt. This is something that people get really afraid of. They don't want to do it. They think it's too hard. They've had bad experiences with it. I am going to show you how to easily make these perfect points. You are going to be so happy with the finished product. When we begin, if you take a look, I am using two borders here, an inner border and an outer border. When you're doing a mitered corner, you sew all of the borders together and then you process them as if they were one unit. You'll measure them as if they are one unit. So there's a formula that you will need to use in order to get the right measurements so you have plenty of fabric left over on each corner in order to fold it and create that mitered border. This is our quilt top wrong side up. Before we can add our borders to the quilt top, we have to mark our stopping point in each corner of our quilt top. We want to make sure that that stopping point is a quarter of an inch in from each edge. So the way that we make that accurately is we just need to use our ruler. I like the Creative Grids ruler because it has my quarter inch marking dashed line right here. I'm going to lay that dashed line right on the horizontal edge of my quilt top and I'm just going to draw a line just right there. It doesn't have to be any particular length. You just want to make sure it goes all the way to the edge of your quilt top. Then I'm going to turn my ruler the other direction and line it up along the vertical edge. That dashed quarter inch marking is going to be lined up on the vertical edge of my quilt top and I'm going to draw the lines so that they cross. This right here is our stopping point. When we add our borders to each side of the quilt, and you're going to do this on every corner of your quilt top before you add any borders, right there that point needs to be marked and you will sew every time you sew a border on or you miter your corners, you will always sew just to that point. Your needle will drop down in that point and then you'll back stitch a little bit, whether you're adding a border, whether you're mitering the corner. This is going to make more sense to you once we add our borders and we begin mitering the corners. When you add your border, you are going to pin it right sides together as always and then when you sew your stitching line all the way across horizontally and vertically on both sides, you will always stop right at this point. There is a formula to figure out exactly how long we need to make our horizontal border strips and our vertical border strips. So here's the formula. First of all, you need to know the width of your border before you add them to your quilt. So my border is five inches. That's my border width, five inches, five inches. I need to know the horizontal measurement of my quilt, which is 40 inches. I need to know the vertical measurement of my quilt, which is 60 inches. So I've got all those numbers in there. Now I plug them into the formula. For the vertical border, I need 60 inches, the length of our vertical side. Then I'm going to multiply my width of my border times two because we know that we have two ends to our quilt. We have the top and the bottom. So two times five inches, the width of my border, is 10. And then we're going to add an extra two inches. So our calculations are going to be 60, the length of our vertical side. And then two times the width of the border, that's 10. So now we're up to 70. And then two extra inches, 72. So our vertical border strips need to be 72 inches long. When we add them to the side, we'll center it so that we have the same amount coming off each end of our quilt top. So you'll do that. For our horizontal measurement, same formula. We just substitute in the horizontal measurement. So 40 inches is the horizontal measurement of our quilt top. The width of the border is five. So we take two times five to allow for those two corners. That gives us an additional 10. So now we're up to 50 inches. And then we are going to add two inches to that. So we have 52 inches. So our horizontal border needs to be 52 inches centered on the side and leaving the extras on the end. So now it's time to miter our corner. We have our borders attached. We have the fabric pressed for the horizontal borders toward the outside. We have the fabric pressed for the vertical borders toward the inside. The reason we do that is so that when we actually miter those corners, we've got a nice connection at the points or the corners that we're creating. So make sure that if you are doing more than one border, that the horizontal borders are pressed toward the outside of the quilt. The vertical borders are pressed toward the inside of the quilt. That's really important. Pressing is the key to making a really beautiful mitered corner on your quilt top. Now that we have our borders measured, we know that, as we said earlier, we have to have that extra on the end in order to miter the corner. There's going to be a little bit of waste. As we do each corner, we're going to do them exactly the same. The first thing you want to do is make sure that your vertical border is underneath, your horizontal border is across and over the vertical border. So once that's done, our mitered corner is going to go diagonally a 45 degree angle from the point of our quilt all the way out to the edge. Now how do we do that and make it easy? There's all kinds of ways out there to do it. I'm going to show you a super easy way. The first step is this edge right here of our border. The horizontal border bottom edge is going to match with the vertical border that is the same. How do we get that together? First of all, right sides together as always. And just do this right along with me. Take the horizontal border and you're going to turn it to the opposite side. As you turn it, what you want to make sure is this edge matches this edge right sides together. So we're going to turn it. We are going to match right sides together right along this edge. Now we want to make sure that we don't have any bubbles or tucks or anything here. This needs to be nice and smooth. Now that little point that we made, that little pencil point is hidden now underneath. But this point right here, we want that sticking out. We don't want it to get caught underneath our seam. So just make sure that even though we can't see that little pencil mark, this point from the corner of our quilt is out of the way. So we've got those right sides together and we're just going to fold it back again. And look it, there they are lined up and this is that miter that we're talking about. This is what we want to sew. The crease that we make with our iron right here is going to be our sewing line. It's going to be right here. And again, this is that crucial point. So how do we make sure that's right? You're just going to give it a little tug. You're going to make sure that you've tugged this bottom so that it's flat and straight and then tug that top. Now that we've got that folded back nicely, we have those inner borders lined up right here. We have folded back that top horizontal border to give us our mitered corner and we can see we've got those points matched up nicely right here. Now I'm going to pin the top here because I don't want this to move. And then I am going to go ahead and press right along this crease right here just so that we get a nice flat crease and so that we can see where our sewing is. I'm going to put another pin in here just so it doesn't wiggle. Our flat head pins, I love these magic pins because they're very thin. It's easy to press right on top of that pin. I don't usually press on top of the plastic but I do press on top of the pin. So go ahead and give that a nice press. I have pressed that down. I'll put a little pressing solution on there just to keep it in line. I want you to look at the back because this is really important. This is where we are going to sew that seam right down here but this is a little bit of a critical area right here. There's our dot. That's our starting point on this side but we don't want to catch that point in our seam when we're sewing this way. So just make sure when you put this under your sewing machine and you get started you're going to sew along the crease and I'll show you that in a second. Just make sure this little piece here is out of the way when you drop your needle down. Really important otherwise it gets messed up and it could look like a tuck on the front or just a little bit of a bump and you don't want that to happen. So just be aware of that little spot right there. Now I've got this all pressed and ready to go. I'm going to open it up so that I can see where I need to sew. So I'll remove this pin and carefully pull this down so that this edge is aligned and I'm going to put my pin just right across that seam. Now we know this is good right here so again we're kind of sewing blindly but if we've got it all lined up right we should be good. Now here's our line. This is that spot I was telling you about. As you put this underneath you're going to start at this little point here. This is that dot that we made on our quilt top. We're going to start there, do a couple of back stitches, sew all the way down that fold, do a couple of back stitches. Just keep all this this little point here out of the way when you put that under your sewing machine so you are only sewing through two layers right here. You're not sewing through any of the seam allowances, just the two layers. That's why it's so important that we mark that point accurately. So let's go ahead and we're going to sew down that way and then we'll press it open. So we've sewn on that crease. Here's my point. Hopefully you can see that I started right there where I needed to start. I'm going to take my pins out and check. Don't do any cutting until you check and make sure it's where you want. This is so easy to rip out and do again if you need to. Just completely redo the process if you're not happy with what your mitered corner looks like. You'd rather have it look good than to just leave it. So as I look, it looks so good. Look at this. You can see my point. I'll press it open. My points line up nicely. My corner does. So what I'm going to do is I am going to trim a quarter inch seam along that line. So here's my ruler. My quarter inch seam. I love this Creative Grids ruler because the quarter inch seam is that dashed line and I lay the dashed line right on my sewing line and then I am just going to trim that off. Make sure you don't get the rest of your quilt under there. That would not be good. So be really careful when you do any trimming. Now you can see I need to press this open. It just reduces the bulk especially when we get to this point right here. And then when I get right as far as I can go, we want this piece to lay flat. So that's going to come back over. So go ahead and press that open and then press that as you're doing that flat when you get to the end. And here we have, look at that perfect little point there. That's all it took to miter that corner. We'll go ahead and do all four corners on our quilt and we will be done. We did it. We've got one done. Wasn't that easy? It goes together quickly. It looks really nice. Mitered corners are beautiful. I love mitered corners. So go ahead. We've got one done. Do the other three corners. Quilt your quilt. Bind it and you are finished. I am always trying to be joyful but I will always be merry. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video.