An unlikely Binding Tool

Binding a quilt has been my greatest enemy. The battle is bloody from start to end, with no survivors. Cutting binding incorrectly ends up with the dreaded “V” and you end folding your quilt like an origami master to connect the tails. In a recent large and heavy quilt project where I found myself working late into the evening to complete, I came to the arduous task of binding the quilt. This was one of those endeavors that required acres of binding, and the tears shed as I struggled to feed the binding along with the quilt. Although not proud of this, my typical solution was to have all the binding on the floor in a puddle then wound once around the lift-arm on my drafting table. As the binding was pulled up, knots and snags were ever a battle companions. On previous projects, I had even tried wrapping my binding around old spools, but the binding was so heavy that it would not feed correctly presenting a tension tug of war. My boyfriend came up with the most elegant solution ever. He took an aluminum soda can and drilled a hole in the bottom of it. Then with a single piece of tape, I wrapped the binding around the can and placed it on a spool stand. Because of the Irregular edge on a soda can and the slight conical base of the stand, the can could rotate and the binding would come off gently but not unwind too fast. Now my binding will forever stay clean and there won’t be any knots to fight. I might add a ring of felt to the can, that way I can pin the binding rather than using tape, but this solution has worked for me!