Fat Quarter Friday: Bias Tape

I love the way that bais tape can really spiffy up a project. Unfortunately, the store only sells solid color bias tape, so make your own adorable bias tape for a fraction of the cost. They now have these nifty bias tape makers for sale, but who really can spend $$$ on something like that? Not me. I did however find out that they have manual ones for less than $10, but again, you can do it yourself for free! I enjoy free things because I am somewhat money conscious (aka: cheap).

This tutorial is sort of confusing the first time you do it (I had to use my seam ripper at one point), but once you've done it once, it's a piece of cake! I used this tutorial.

Materials:
1 fat quarter
Fabric pen
Regular sewing stuff (sewing machine, scissors, iron)

Step 1: Trim your fat quarter so it's a nice even rectangle with no selvage. Position it so the long edges are horizontal.

 Fold the upper right hand corner down until the edges meet up perfectly like so. Iron it so you get a nice crease.

 Cut along the crease.

 Step 2: Take the triangle that you just made (upper right) and translate it (slide without rotating; 7th grade math term, does it ring any bells?) so that the blue marked edges from the picture above are next to each other. They should form a parallelogram.

 Fold them right sides together so that the "blue" marked edges are together. Sew with a 1/4" seam.

 Iron the seam open. Now you can really see your parallelogram in all of it's quadrilateral glory.

 Step 3: Turn your parallelogram so that the long edges are vertical like so. Using a fabric pen, mark every 1 3/4" (you can see mine in purple). Trim off any excess.

Now turn your parallelogram like so. We're going to match up the lines you just made. Match the corresponding arrows

Fold the fabric up and pin in place.

Now sew along the pinned edge.

Step 4: Take a pair of scissors and cut along the lines you made with the fabric pen.

You should get one looooong strip.

Step 5: Now we're going to iron it into bias tape. With the right side facing out, iron the strip in half lengthwise.

Once you've done that, open it up and fold the two edges in to the center crease you just made

and then fold back in half along your original crease. Iron so it stays in place. You're all done! Enjoy your cute bias tape!