Binding practice

I finished three quilts yesterday.  Not from scratch mind you, that would have been impossible, and I would have to be on crack (which is also impossible).  They all just needed binding. To speed up the process I sewed all the binding on by machine, (front and back) rather than finishing by hand.  These old WIPs were the perfect guinea pigs on which to practice some machine binding.
One of the quilts is 3 years old and I don't much care for it anymore.  It was made when I was going through my Orange phase.  So let's get that one out of the way first.

This quilt is from Oh, Fransson!, and it's called Crazy 9 Patch Lattice.  You can find it here.  Please note her blog post was from 2010.  That's about when I made this.  If this quilt were any older, I would have to photograph it laying over a walker.
 The pattern was really fun, kind of a stack 'n whack quilt, if you remember those.

The binding had already been sewn to the front of the quilt. I just folded it over to the back, and sewed it down again by machine.  You end up with a line of stitching on the front of your quilt, right next to the binding, like above.  For the next two quilts, I sewed the binding to the back of the quilt first, then flipped it to the front to finish. That line of stitching then appears on the back.  Blah, blah blah, binding, blah, blah. Are you still with me?
Not sure which method I prefer, but I do know they both take some practice.  I managed to produce a plethora of wonky stitches, resulting in the judicious use of my seam ripper and swearing of epic proportions.  However, even going very slowly on the machine, it's still faster than sewing it down by hand.  Yes, I will make this work.

Here is a jelly roll race quilt made with Comma by Zen Chic.  The main objective is to sew all your 2.5 inch strips together until you have a quilt.  The VERY FIRST part of the instructions say to cut off about 18 inches of your first strip in order to off-set the colors and seams.  Apparently I was so excited to begin the race, I forgot this little tidbit.  As a result, there is a pool of orange and black in the center of the quilt.  Not a big deal, but now I think it has kind of a Halloween flair. 
Yes, that orange keeps coming back to haunt me.

 The last quilt was made from the book Zakka Style.  No orange in this one, but the pattern called for linen, and I didn't have any at the time, so I used some Osnaburg from my stash.   Looks like a cross between a linen and burlap.  It's very cheap affordable (usually around $4.00 per yard), but shrinks like crazy, so you must pre-wash.  It also frays like crazy, and it's hard to rip out any mistakes because of the loose weave. Don't get me started on the wavy binding.  Just crazy.  Have I convinced you to buy some yet?

I had the brilliant idea to use a decorative "s" stitch on my machine for the quilting.  But the stitch length was too small (couldn't be adjusted), and after two rows sewn right down the middle, I noticed the fabric was distorted at the bottom.  The stitches were so tiny, they couldn't be pulled out for fear of tearing, so I flung it to the back of the closet for a time-out, which lasted about a year.
So yesterday I dug it out, finished up some rows of straight quilting, and added the binding.
I'm not mad at it anymore.  I think it's kinda cute!

The other fabric in this quilt, which played nicely, was a charm pack of Hello Luscious.  To check out the machine binding tutorials I used go look at this or that.
I must say, I'm relieved to get these behind me.