Need to sew binding on carpet and flooring? Here are some simple tips which will help improve the process of sewing the binding around gentle outside curves using the Sailrite 1 ¼” Binder. Okay, a couple of things that we’re doing here that are a little bit making a couple of minor adjustments to make this sometimes work a little better with thicker things like flooring. First off, what we’ve done is we’ve set the binder. We’ve canted it just a little bit to where it is pointing to the left.
What that will do is as you’re feeding, it’ll help you to not have this portion of the binder in the way. If you’ve got it completely straight, or even worse canted this way, then you’re going to have a tough time keeping the material all the way over at the needle, which is of course where it’s most important. So you can see we’ve got it canted just a little bit that way. The other thing that we’ve done here is we have actually set the binding attachment basically as close up to the foot as possible. You can see that when I drop the foot and rotate the machine, you can see that the foot comes almost to that, but not quite touching it.
So you get just a little bit of gap there. So we’ve got this moved forward as far as we can. Lastly, what we’ve done is we’ve taken one of our Suisei Magnetic Sewing Guides and we’ve set this up behind here basically to act as an additional fence. What that’ll do for us is as the material exists the binder, it will help to keep everything for instance, if we push over here, the binding may want to push out. Well, by taking this guide- and as you can see it sticks quite a bit- by taking this guide and just setting it in here, what we’re doing is we’re basically extending out the fence of the guide.
So that way as the material exists and pushes over, you’re not going to push the binding out from underneath the material. Lastly, sometimes this is necessary, sometimes not, but sometimes the binder will have a tendency to want to come backwards on you. What we’ve done is we’ve went ahead and stuck a second guide there. That’ll help keep the binder from kicking out when you’re going around curves. What we’re using for a binding is the Felt Polyester Tape Binding.
This is a really economical binding, but it does hold up quite well. The nice thing, too, is also it conforms really well to curves. It does sew nicely. The edges, as you can see, are just finished. There’s no folding or anything so there’s not a lot of thickness to it.
So it does fold over nicely and work well Once again probably the most important thing to remember as your sewing is, of course, practice makes perfect, but most importantly is you need to learn to be focused on what’s going on right here When you first start out, you have a tendency to maybe focus back here as far as where you’re feeding But in reality, it doesn’t matter where you’ve got the material here What matters is where it’s at underneath the needle
So you definitely want to pay attention to that portion more than anything. This is being sewn with the Sailrite Fabricator Sewing Machine Power Stand with a Workhorse Servo Motor available exclusively at Sailrite. Especially when you’re getting to curves, you can see as I’m curving it, I’m walking around the curve and I’m focused on the needle, not on the binder Eric: The Sailrite 1 ¼” Swing Away Straight Binder is excellent for straight-aways and outside gentle curves like this. It is not very good for inside curves.
In fact, we swing it out of the way and do the inside curves by hand when we reach those. It works great for straight-aways and gentle outside curves. The flooring we’re sewing this binding to is a marine quality vinyl mesh with a foam backing. It’s called Infinity Luxury Woven Flooring and it’s available at Sailrite. Now as you can see we’ve got a few different types of bindings and they all perform just a little bit differently.
Now this particular binding you can see what happens is sometimes it maybe gathers just a little bit there, but because it is fairly conformable, basically you can just take it after you’re done and just flatten that all out nice. It’ll really take to that pretty nicely Now on the underside, you can see back here in this corner right here, I nearly missed it. Now I did manage to keep it all in there, but as you’re coming around the corners, this binding (because it is pretty conformable) may have a tendency to want to go towards the top versus the bottom. But still we managed to get a pretty good cut there.
Now with this type of binding, it’s a little bit stiffer. What happens there is you can see on the backside it tended to stay in place a little better. It didn’t want to walk up towards the front like it did on the bottom. That might also be just because of the grippiness of the binding itself. Still lays pretty nice and flat.
You can kind of work it into place a little bit. Now you can see takes the curves very nicely and probably gives you the cleanest edge. But because of its stiffness, you may have a tendency for Sunbrella Acrylic Binding to create a mat that doesn’t necessarily want to lay completely flat in the corners. You can see that if I push down it wants to pop up, or push up it wants to stay up.
So you may have a little bit of issue there. Now that could work itself out over time, but that is one instance where the softer, more conformable binding might be superior Eric.