How to sew a mitered border

I just LOVE a good mitered border. This is the king of all borders in my opinion, reserved for the most striking patterns and fabrics.

I choose to use a mitered border for two reasons:

  1. The quilt is put together on point and it would just look weird to all of a sudden have a seam going straight across instead of on the diagonal.
  2. The fabric is either too fabulous to cut off abruptly for a straight border or would just look plain ridiculous in a straight border.

A great example of a fabric that always looks better in a mitered border than cut off in a straight border are stripes. Fabric, like quilt designs, have a flow to them that tells your eye where to go as you look at it.

In the case of stripes, you are either looking up and down or side to side. There is a clear path to follow. If you choose a regular straight border, then two of your sides are going to have stripes that are abruptly cut off when the perpendicular borders meet and the stripes are all of a sudden going in a different direction.

Now unless you want to worry about cutting your borders so the stripes are always going in the same direction, and then fussy cut them even further to match up the stripes, a mitered border is a fun, fast way to make those stripes converge at a 45 degree angle.

This always looks better that straight borders because the stripes meet and then change direction in a pleasing way. In other words the line of the fabric isn’t broken, it just changes direction. This adds visual interest, is more pleasing to the eye and make you look like a quilting rock star.

Mitered borders may sound tough, there are 45 degree seams to deal with, and you have to leave the last quarter-inch of stitching free. But I make it easy in the video tutorial above. We’ll break it down step by step, so you can also have fabulous, flat mitered borders.

And today’s post is all about teaching you something new. But if you need some striped fabric to test this tutorial out on, I can help you with that too. Just click here to check out all the striped fabric available over at shop.quiltaddictsanonymous.com. As I write this, we have more than 40 striped fabrics to choose from in fabulous modern prints. I hope you love them as much as I do.

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