How to Trim Strings on a Placemat

Video Transcript

"Shelly Cordsen here with Expert Village. And we're coming down to finishing up our personality placements. Okay. We have sewed around. We have done a miter seam in connecting our binding. Now what we're going to do is just go along and trim all your loose strings off. You're going to have strings at every corner because we stopped and started at every corner so that we can get a mitered corner. And this is one area that most quilters struggle with. And it took me a long time to finally figure this out and not get a curvy puckery corner. So you're going to come in t your corner here and you're just going to trim, not the binding, but your quilt part. Just take a little nip of the corner off. Okay. Now normally we would iron. We would just take our iron and push this out and this would automatically flip back into a mitered corner. But you don't want to put the iron to your vinyl. So you're just going to have to really finger press this out. You're going to flip it over and you're going to come all the way out until you've got to out here and you're going to fold this back. And your corner should match perfectly, creating your mitered corner. And I like to use my clips again to hold that down. And you'll come along and do that to every corner. And just pull this all out, come in and again we don't want to puncture holes in our vinyl. We'll put our clips. Okay. Maybe I can show it over here a little bit better. You see how your mitered corner looks in the front? A mitered corner is where it forms a straight line out. We come around and this is what it should look like on your back side if you use that technique. And if you'll see here where we mitered the binding together? It creates less bulk because you spread that seam out instead of having all your bulk with the straight seam. So, we now have everything binded on this one. I suggest you could, as you turn it over, top stitch right along the edge of your fabric. Make sure you're catching this on the back side, if you would like. Do not puncture the vinyl. But me, I'm a hand sewer. I do all my bindings by hand. But you can have that option."