A Friday Finish - Christmas Table Runner & Binding Odd Angles

Whoop Whoop!  That's the sound of me doing the happy dance.  Please forgive yet another table runner post but I finished my project for the Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland swap on time.  It's been posted and should arrive to my swap partner today!  I'm so happy with how this turned out. 

Also forgive the indoor photo, I finished hand sewing the binding down at the last minute and have no daylight photos.  In Ireland at this time of year approaching the shortest day of the year it's dark until well after 8am and the sun is getting low in the sky around 3.30pm!

I had a devil of a time choosing binding for this that matched both the front and back.  I pulled all that I could from my stash and in the end decided that the front was more important and so I chose this white with light green dots to keep a bright clean feeling to the project. 

Another lesson learned.  Don't pick backing because it's Christmassy and I like the pattern!  This runner, that I designed putting 3 star blocks together, has angles greater than 90 degrees so mitred corners on the binding is a little different than squared edges.  I backstitched 1/4" away from the edge.

And then I found the easiest way to create the mitred corner was, to hold the straight edge I want to sew next straight ahead of me and fold the binding straight up lining up with edge of the quilt sandwich.

Then fold it straight down making sure the binding lies exactly on top of the first fold.

 You get a little pocket that when folded to the back gives a nice mitred finish.

I did this the whole way round, all the odd corners, and folded the binding back and held it in place with some clips.  Then I hand sewed the binding to the back of the runner.

It's fairly dotty but I like it!  We also had to put a small Christmas decoration in with our table runner so I crocheted a snowflake from the December edition of Simply Crochet magazine.

Crochet drives me bananas sometimes and I had to rip out round 4 three times but got there in the end!

So now they are all on the way to my swap partner.  Hope she likes them!  
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