Leftover Binding

Pat Sloan had a great post, Did you ever...a Binding Saga, on he extra binding you have at the end of binding a quilt and what you do with it. Of course there were the usual comments related to using it on small projects or making scrappy bindings for scrap quilts.  Other answers included stuffing it in a drawer, or a baggie, and rolling it on on water bottles, or repressing it to use in scrap quilts.  Two unique answers included making a rug and using it around the edges of pies to keep them from burning and to help hold in the juices. Now that is what I call getting creative with the extra binding. I will have to store that idea away fro the next time I make a pie.

One person said they roll the extra binding up up and store it in a drawer, which is what I use to do until I hit upon a great idea. I do not remember where this idea came from. I could have read it somewhere, in a magazine, on another blog, who knows. It might be something I dreamed up, but I have started using my extra binding in a new way that helps me to prolong the life of items I use everyday.

We all have towels and those towels often get worn along the edges and start to fray, while the main body of the towel itself is still in very good condition and usable. I decided there had to be a way to extended the life of the towel and then saw my drawer of left over bindings and that is when the idea jumped out and grabbed my attention.

Now, as I said before I could have seen this idea somewhere else and just do not remember because I filled it in the back of my brain for future reference. After all I taught middle school and high school, primarily, for almost 30 years and raised two boys, and have read a ton of books and magazines over the years so who knows where the idea came from.

I try to match the binding color to the towel color when I can or at least make sure that they complement each other, as I really do not want them to clash and look ugly. I am of the school of white towels are a pain to keep clean , so all of my towels are colored.  In fact color coordinating towels is one way I kept my boys from fighting over whose towel was whose when they were younger. If you have white towels then you  don't have to worry about the binding clashing with the towel.

So far I have just done bath towels, and I do have a few that I need to totally replace and am thinking that I may just binding the new ones to start off with so they don't ever start to fray. I like the look of my towels and it adds a little more decoration to them. Since I have a ton of left over binding I am thinking I will attack the hand towels next and maybe move on to the kitchen after that.

I have also thought of binding some new towels for each of the boys as part of their Christmas gift this year, after all we can always use more towels.  I know I have some extra red and blue binding that I can use up on their towels.

Just in case you are wondering, yes I do still color coordinate their gifts in their favorite colors when I buy things that are the same. It's a mom thing.