#bias tape

[anielskaaniela]

How to Sew a Hem: A Beginner’s Guide to Different Hemming Techniques

 In this post, you will discover different hemming techniques that you can use for your sewing projects. Hemming is one of the most essential skills in sewing. It can make a huge difference in the appearance, fit, and durability of your garments. Hemming can also add some style and personality to your clothes, as well as protect them from fraying and unraveling. There are many types of hemming…

[wastelesscrafts]

How to bind a neckline with bias tape

One easy and neat way to bind a neckline when making your own clothes is by using bias tape.

This Sew Guide article will show you six different ways to bind a neckline with bias tape.

Don't have any bias tape? Check out my bias tape 101 post to learn how to make your own. It's a great way to reuse fabric scraps!

[20dollarlolita]

Quick tips: Bias Tape Folders

Bias tape is very useful. Hems, shaped hems, curved seams, armholes, neck holes, loops ribbon, bias tape is very useful.

It's also just a specially cut piece of fabric that's been folded. Bias tape is on the list of things that I recognize are very inexpensive to make, but still bought because making bias tape is a pain in the ass. If I really needed a coordinating color or pattern, or I only needed four feet of it, I'd make it, but if I needed yardage, I'd buy it.

Making bias tape with your iron isn't hard. You cut your bias strips and piece them on your machine, then fold the entire strip in half and iron it, then go back and fold the sides into the center crease and iron it. It's just very boring.

We can make the bias strip cutting and piecing faster with the continuous bias method, but you still have to iron it to make it stop being a bias strip and start being a bias tape.

Or you can make a robot do it for you.

Strip goes in, iron it, bias tape comes out. It's that simple.

Yes, my ironing board is ugly.

I'm not a huge fan of gimmicky single-purpose sewing gizmos unless they make something a whole lot easier, and that's what these do. You still have to cut the strip the right length, but the little doodad there will fold it so that you can iron it all in one go. It compensates for your cutting being a little bit off to get you tape that's the same width all the way down.

I have two. One makes a 1" strip into a 1/4" single fold bias tape, and one that makes a 2" strip into a 1/2" single fold tape, which can easily be folded in half to be a 1/4" wide double fold tape. Those are the two bias tapes most commonly used in apparel. If you quilt, you might also use extra wide double-fold quilt binding and there's a tape maker for that but I don't quilt so.

Anyway, today I made 25 yards of bias tape in 45 minutes instead of 4 hours, so I thought these things deserve their own post.

I always forget what width of strip to cut so I write it on the makers themselves in paint maker.

[planeswalk]

Made just over 8m of bias tape today. I can now appreciate why folks don't like making the stuff. The striped one was made from a fat quarter yard, the pink one was made from a fat quarter meter.

[junkologistsgoods]

Simplicity Bias Tape The Winder with accessories

[kieraoonadiy]

New year, New Video!!

[eppujensen]

Love the color combo in this mini quilt by Mister Domestic – blues and greens are what I and hubby are all about. The scale of this mini mini quilt is impressive, too! Via Pinterest.

[fauvester]

OK I GOT MYSELF EXCITED.... ANDORIAN LATE 1860S

[rthwrms]

DREAM PORTAL

a quilt for when u leave at night and return with the morning sun :-)

[druidfalls]

i hate him and his slutty, slutty little shirt. this shirt makes no sense, it’s a nightmare of garment construction, and i hate that i’m going to try to sew it anyway

[spocks-kaathyra]

frankly ridiculous amounts of bias tape on this costume but luckily after my garak cosplay I'm literally soooo good at mitered corners

[badassindistress]

Cloaksforall Sewalong Step 5 - Binding the cloak

Gravity might have made your edges uneven, put it on and check if there's no pieces markedly longer than others.

Now it's time to bind the edges of your cloak. I think bias tape makes this easiest.

Unfold one edge of your bias tape and align it with the edge of the cloak, folded side towards you (right side to right side). Make sure a bit of bias tape sticks out.

Pin the bias tape down in the fold line. Sew with a straight stitch.

Cut the bias tape off with a cm extra left over.

Fold the left over sticking out pieces inwards towards the cape

Fold over the bias tape so that the neat folded edge is on the wrong side and covers the raw edge completely.

Pin down and sew at the edge of the bias tape.

The only thing that's left is to put on our closures tomorrow!

[oneknightlight]

Yknow if Joanne’s really wants to stay in business and thrive again they have to completely redirect their targeted audience. Most people don’t walk into Joanne’s and go “god I REALLY want to get hundreds of dollars worth of Easter decor, and yards and yards of gold metallic brocade and this specialty st Patrick’s day flannel”

Most people walk into Joanne’s and go “man I’m like 5 black buttons short for my project” and then they go to the button isle and all of the buttons are ornately designed except for the single overpriced bag of regular black buttons.

[voltrons]

OH I DIDNT POST MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME!! but here is the howl jacket i made :]]] it’s far from perfect but for making it in three days i’m prETTY PROUD OF IT!!!

[mearchuimhne]

I despise having to make bias tape.

But there is something very satisfying about the bias tape maker.

[dustedmagazine]

Marc Masters — High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (University of North Carolina Press)

There’s a popular theory, advanced with varying degrees of seriousness, that the best kind of music is whatever was released when you were about 16. There’s also a fairly well-known Brian Eno quotation about the way we tend to romanticize forms of media just as they fall out of currency, eventually becoming loved even for their shortcomings. One of the biggest strengths of Marc Masters’ High Bias, a new history of the compact cassette (as it was originally known), is that it refuses both the personally biased special pleading of the former and the possibly distorting format nostalgia of the latter. Instead Masters brings together a fascinating technical history of the creation, limits, and virtues of the cassette tape, an overview of some of the areas where the medium has been most richly used and adopted, and a reflection on its continued vitality.

That last aspect, which is reflected on throughout High Bias and forms the focus of the book’s last chapter, is one example of the balance Masters manages to strike. It would be easy to fall into a kind of strenuous insistence on the most optimistic vision of the cassette’s future, to tell us that it could or should regain a level of prominence it hasn’t seen in decades. But to do so would require a… selective choice of data, and would probably fall into a kind of “protesting too much” register for many readers. Masters instead has the confidence and knowledge of the actual current (vital, but subcultural) role of cassette tapes to make the more modest but resonant point that the ‘cassette revival,’ such as it is, is already with us and shows no signs of going away. And he both puts this in its proper, inspiring context and makes a persuasive case for its importance because of the book’s continual emphasis on the democratizing and personalizing aspects of cassette tape as a medium.

The opening chapters, which include relatively brief looks at the context of recording technology prior to and at the time of the cassette’s introduction, set the stage well. Masters doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the social, marketing and profit motives impinging on the development and success of the medium (and the sometimes panicked response of the music industry to it, “home taping is killing music” and all), and points out how those aren’t totally separable from the explosion in personal expression that tapes allow. From there, High Bias branches out, looking at various places and times cassettes have helped or even allowed particular peoples, scenes or genres to be heard and spread in ways other media haven’t managed. From Deadheads to the early days of hiphop, Awesome Tapes From Africa to some of the more extremely personal examples that sometimes overlap with those covered in Michael Tau’s recent Extreme Music (reviewed on Dusted here), this slim volume doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive but does manage to illuminate enough different areas most readers may find themselves surprised by at least one of the many little pockets Masters looks into.

The second-last chapter, “The Tape Makers,” may be where High Bias hits many of its intended audience in an even more personal place. Here the book shifts slightly from people making music onto, or then distributed via, cassette, and instead delves into the personal mixtape. The balance between creation and curation is never that clearcut, of course, and the chapter doesn’t pretend it is. But whereas after the cassette we have burned CDs and playlists, before the team at Philips first brought the compact cassette to the world there was simply no mass-available form that offered the particular form of expression that a mixtape does. As with the rest of High Bias, here Masters uses a blend of interviews, secondary sources and direct experience to convey the unique role and impact of the cassette, both in its historical moment and persisting into the current day.

It’s not that the cassette tape is a “better” medium than vinyl, CD, DAT, or saved or streamed digital files (what would “better” even mean in anything other than a subjective sense?), and it’s not that High Bias, despite its doubly accurate title (both a desired quality in a cassette and an implicit acknowledgment that this a very pro-tapes book), tries to make that claim. But Masters clearly had in his sights a compelling portrait of the strengths of the format, and what makes it different from those other media, and here he convincingly portrays it as a special and worthy one. He’s even set up a, well, mixtape for the book on Bandcamp (linked at the beginning of this review), 12 tracks all sourced from current tape labels he discusses in the book. Notably, you can buy that mix on a cassette.

Ian Mathers