I've been making my binding the same way now for ...a lot of years. Measure the perimeter of the quilt, divide by 42" and use the product to tell me how many strips to cut. Then I'd lay them out and start putting the ends right sides together, marking a 45degree angle, and stitching them.
This is all fine and dandy and my bindings all turned out nicely (unless I sewed them together wrong...which may have happened a time or 300) and everyone lived happily ever after.
I had a king-size quilt to bind and didn't relish cutting the strips and making the binding. But then my old brain remembered something.
I was at an AQS quilt show and had stopped by the AccuQuilt booth. They did a demonstration using a half-square triangle die to make your binding ends opposite angles from one another.
I had an AccuQuilt Go! cutter and had bought the die at the show. Apparently I had a brain fart and forgot about it until I had to make a super long strip of binding. So I pulled it out and set to making some binding!
I cut my strips using the 2 1/2 inch strip cutter die. I fan-folded the fabric over the cutting die marks and cut all 11 strips at one pass. Then I took three strips - because the AccuQuilt cuts 6 layers of fabric at one time - flipped them over in the middle so that all the right sides were together, and used the 45 degree angle on the half-square triangle die to cut the ends.
Allow me to demonstrate:
Now, using the AccuQuilt, you have to place a cutting mat on top of the shape that you want to cut. this presses the blades and the mat together to produce that nice, clean cut. On this half square triangle die, there's a blade at the bottom that will cut the base of the triangle. Don't put the cutting mat over this line!!! I'm here to tell you that it will cut off your binding strips in a hurry.
Using the AccuQuilt to cut my binding strips and the angles saved me time making the binding. I'm definitely going to use it for future projects!
I hope this inspires you to try something new.
Happy Stitching, Everyone
MeLinda