Scrappy bias binding

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to have a go at making a scrappy bias binding to go on the Woodland Baby Quilt I've been working on. After a little browsing around on the web, I decided to have a play and see what happened.  First I cut some strips of my scrappy fabrics - these are the same fabrics I used in the body of the quilt, as the borders of the little squares. I worked out that I needed to start with a 20" square in order to make continuous bias binding (calculate the length of binding needed, in my case approx 176 inches, multiply by width of binding - 2.25" for me - then find the square root of that for the length of the sides of your square - mine came out to something like 18.9 - hence, 20"), so I cut an appropriate number of strips in the right width.

This is really not a tutorial - there are some good ones on the web if you want one - just a little commentary on what I did.

I sewed these together, realised they weren't quite wide enough, so added another strip of a different fabric I used to make up the difference.

Once I had a square, I cut it in half along the diagonal. 

And then stiched the two halves back together to make a rhombus/parallelogram/whatever.  After that, you turn it over and mark your strips in pencil along the back. I hate this part, and was reminded why I don't normally make continuous bias binding.

Once that's done, you line up the edge of one side of the fabric with the first drawn line on the other side and stitch it together to make a tube.

You then use scissors to cut on the line to make your strip. It's a very clever method, if a bit fiddly. With single fabric binding I would never, ever bother. However, the effect achieved for this scrappy binding might just about be worth the effort...

Once it's folded and pressed, you can see I've got loads of changes in the fabric; there's no way I'd make French fold binding with this many pieces, that's for sure.