Make Your Own Extra Wide Bias Tape – Muse of the Morning – Hand Dyed Embroidery Floss & Fabric + PDF Embroidery Patterns

Make Your Own Bias Tape - a tutorial from Muse of the Morning

This is a tutorial on how to make your own extra wide bias tape. I love bias tape and I use it on a lot of different project!

Why would you want to make your own bias tape, when it’s sold in the store?

Well, for one thing, making your own is less expensive. Bias tape in the store is often part polyester and cheap, thin fabric. Making your own allows you to control the quality.

But the best and most important reason to make your own bias tape is because you can use whatever fabric you like! You can use fabric that matches or coordinates to your project, or just some cute fabric that you love. You can make yards and yards from bias tape from just a fat quarter too – so it’s a good way to use up scraps or those precious fabrics that you just have a little bit of.

Bias tape is just for binding quilts, right?

Nope. Bias tape is some awesome stuff and can be used for a lot of things. You can use it on sleeveless outfits, as binding along the raw edges. You can use some coordinating fabric to make some to bind the edge of a skirt, or pants….
You can also use extra wide bias tape as drawstrings or straps by just folding it over and stitching it into a tube . There’s a lot of usage for bias tape.

You’re going to need this tool:

To make bias tape, you’re going to need a Bias Tape Maker, although I’ve seen tutorials for making it with a pin on your ironing board.

You’re also going to need an iron with steam, or a spray bottle.

There is also an electric bias tape maker from Simplicity that is pretty high tech and awesome. You still have to cut the fabric and stitch it together, but then the machine does the ironing and folding part for you. It’s pretty cool and totally worth it if you’re going to make a lot of bias tape.

Let’s Get Started:

Step 1:

The first step for extra wide bias tape, is to cut 2 inch wide strips of your fabric. I recommend cutting with a rotary cutter and ruler. If you’re cutting on the grain, you can rip the fabric and it will make just fine strips.

Tip! Bias tape doesn’t always have to be cut on the bias. If it’s going to be used around a curve, it should, but if it’s going to be used on straight edges, you’re just fine cutting it on the grain!

I didn’t take a photo or show steps for this part because I’m not very good at cutting the fabric on the bias. Instead, here is a really nice tutorial on how to cut bias strips from a fat quarter. According to that tutorial, you can get up to 5 yards of binding from one fat quarter!

Step 2:

If you cut or tore strips on the grain, you’ll need to join your strips together. Match the ends up perpendicular to each other.

Sew the strips together from point to point as shown in the picture below. Do this for every strip you need to join together.

Cut the tip of the triangle off, leaving 1/4 inch seam allowance.

Spread the bias tape out and iron the seams open.

Step 3:

Thread the fabric strip through the wide end to the narrow end of the bias tape maker. As it comes out the narrow end, iron the folds over. Use steam or the spray bottle liberally if needed.

This is the time consuming part…. but it’s kind of relaxing, doesn’t take a lot of brain matter to do….
I like to do a length as long as my ironing board at a time. Once I move the bias tape maker and iron to the end, I move up another length onto the board.

That’s It!

And then you’ve got lengths and lengths of bias tape! You could also iron the bias tape in half at this point, but I don’t usually find it necessary because you’ll be sewing it to whatever you’re making, or folding it when you sew it in half if you make drawstrings.