Have you ever gotten to the place where the fabric you picked out as the perfect binding ends up being too short? Don’t you just hate that? Here’s the formula for calculating how much fabric you will need to cut out binding that will go all the way around the quilt and meet up at the end.

These formulas are for creating French Binding where you have double fabric going over the edge of your quilt

Straight of grain binding

• Step 1: Determine the perimeter of your quilt. Measure each side and add the numbers together.
• Step 2: Divide the number above by 40. This will tell you the number of strips you’ll need (assuming you’ll be cutting from the full width of fabric).
• Step 3: Decide how wide you want the binding on the finished quilt ie. how much fabric you want showing on the front of the quilt.
• Step 4: Multiply that number by 4 and add 1/2 inch. This is the width of the binding strips you’ll need to cut,
• Step 5: Multiply the number of strips you calculated in Step 2 by the width you calculated in Step 4.
• That gives you the amount of fabric you’ll need to cover the edge of your quilt with a fudge factor just in case.

Bias binding

• Step 1: Determine the perimeter of your quilt. Measure each side and add the numbers together.
• Step 2: Decide how wide you want the binding to be on the finished quilt ie. how much fabric you want showing on the front of the quilt.
• Step 3: Multiply that number by 4 and add 1/2 inch. This is the width of the binding strips you’ll need to cut
• Step 4: Multiply the perimeter of your quilt by the width of the binding strips.
• Step 5: Calculate the square root of the number you got in Step 4. If you’ve forgotten your high school algebra (who hasn’t) use a calculator with a square root function. If you don’t have a calculator, there are a lot of free calculator apps for your smart phone.
• This process gives you the size of the fabric square you’ll need to be able to cut enough strips to go around the edge of you quilt.