I recently made a wooden swinging seat for our back garden for which I now need to make some cushions. The type of cushions I want requires a piping bias to be sewn around the perimeter. Piping bias can be bought ready-made, however, there are a couple of reasons why that’s not always a good idea. One is that it can be quite expensive if you need a lot of it and two is that the fabric and colour are unlikely to be an exact match to the rest of your project. For those reasons I made my own and this post will cover how I did that.
MATERIALS & TOOLS REQUIRED
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Materials
- Fabric of choice
- Piping cord
- Sewing thread
Tools
I am primarily a DIYer and a woodworker hence I don’t have many sewing tools at all. The tools listed here are what I used but if you have more equipment which would be helpful, please do you use it.
- Sewing machine (optional)
- Sewing pins
- Measuring tape
- Fabric scissors
- Straight edge
- Iron & ironing board
STEP 1: CUTTING THE FABRIC
To start with, you need a square-ish piece of fabric from which you will make your bias. Lay it out on a flat surface and fold it into a triangle. If the fabric is not perfectly square, that’s ok. Just make sure that the triangle edges are perfectly aligned.
Next, cut the triangle on the fold. The easiest way to get a straight cut here is to get a straight edge of some sort to hold the fabric down. I used a long level to do just that.
Now is the time to cut the fabric into strips starting at this fold cut. The strips have to be cut this way (diagonally, i.e on the bias) to make sure that the fabric is stretchy. This will help with attaching it to your project around corners.
The strips will be folded in half width-wise to give the final width of the bias so you need to cut them twice as wide as what you want the finished result to be. I originally thought that I would like my piping to be a couple of inches wide so I cut my first strip to be 4 inches. Once it was cut though it seemed way too wide and wasteful so I cut the strip in half again to end up with 2 inch strips. I cut the rest of the bias strips to be 2 inches. This will give me 1 inch wide piping bias in the end.
Be mindful of how long the piping needs to be in the end. For me, I had to cut almost the full triangle, just the very inner bit was left over at the end.
STEP 2: SEWING THE FABRIC TOGETHER
After all the strips are cut out, I went ahead and squared off the ends as they were all angled. This meant I ended up with a bunch of very thin but long rectangular strips.
These need to be joined together to make a single super-long strip. To do this, take 2 strips and lay their faces together and edges touching but perpendicular to each other (at a 90 degree angle). See the picture below as this is really hard to explain. Pop a couple of pins in to hold the strips in place. Be mindful of where the pins go – you will need to stitch across the area where the strips join so that when you unfold the strips, it is one continuous long strip.
When you’re happy with the pin positioning, sew diagonally across the pinned strips and cut off the overhanging corner. Then attach the rest of the strips to this one to make one long strip.
STEP 3: SEWING IN THE PIPING CORD
Once all the individual fabric strips are joined to make one long super-strip, you need to iron the joins open to making it easier to sew in the piping cord. Then, simply start with one end of the fabric strip. Place the piping cord into the centre and fold the fabric in half. Sew it closed fairly close to the cord but not right on it. You want to leave a bit of space for when you sew the piping bias to your actual design – it risks being visible in the final project if you stitch too close at this stage.
THE RESULT
The result is a long continuous piece of piping bias that you can use to edge various projects such as bags and cushions.
