When you are making an Elemental Coat, you can repurpose your quilt coat binding, it’s easy to place the long collar edge along the binding, but what about the sides? Sometimes I would cut the collar out of the main quilt and then rebind the whole thing. Then I realized there was a way to make it easier and get a nicer finish. It involves a little unpicking of stitches, but you’ll find it’s absolutely worth it!

For this sample, I used a quilt that I’d purchased at a thrift store. It was a mass-made quilt and cost less than $70 (I was able to make both a size E Elemental Coat and a Big Kids Elemental Kids Coat). You can use this technique with both handmade or mass-made quilts.

How to:

1. Lay Collar pattern with long straight side along the binding.
2. Cut with 5″ tails on either end in order to get the extra binding.
3. Unpick stitches along tail and another inch past the collar corner.
4. Cut off tail to match Collar pattern piece.
5. Fold a miter at the corner and bring binding along the side.
6. Clip or pin in position.
7. Sew with a similar color thread and stitch length, backstitching at both ends.
8. Trim extra binding length.
9. Sew on collar as directed in the Elemental Coat pattern.

Give it a try on your next quilt coat and see how simple it is to do and how great the results are. You’ll want to do it that way every time.

You can grab your copy of the Elemental Coat and the Elemental Kids Coat at my pattern shop at crinkledreams.com

Happy sewing!