Quilt Binding Jig

OK, story time.

 

My wife, whose maker hobbies are mainly sewing and quilting, came to me after watching a YouTube video and asked, "Can you make me a thing I saw the lady in the video use to help with her edge binding?"

 

What she said sounded to me like she'd asked me to make something that would help her grinkle her plurguff. The sheer amount of nothing I know about sewing or quilting should collapse under it's own weight and form a black hole, but despite that I replied, "Sure can!  Happy to!"

 

She sent me the video, which featured a nice lady named Karen with a retired English teacher vibe. She was extraordinarily enthusiastic about quilting, organizing your quilting space, and taking care of "scraps"--which as it turned out was not the name of her new puppy, but leftover pieces of fabric created by making the little blocks that are sewn together to make quilts.

 

The video featured about four seconds of a plastic doohickey which was clearly 3D printed, apparently by her husband.

 

Since Karen had nearly 500,000 subscribers, I figured that she might have a web presence and maybe a merch store, so I found her blog.  There was in fact merch, but it was quilting patterns and a couple of branded coffee mugs.  No plastic doohickey.

 

I thought maybe she or her hubby might have shared the thing online, so I searched the usual suspects.  Nope.  I checked Etsy and Facebook to see if she (or anyone) was selling it.  Nope.  So I went back to the four seconds of video.

 

She mentioned that the piece of fabric she was sticking in the plastic doohickey was 2 1/2 inches wide, which served as an adequate reference to allow me to estimate the remaining dimensions of the thing.  I could easily enough eyeball the angles and so, with the video paused on the best frame to look at it, I sketched it in my cute little spiral-bound graph paper-ruled design notebook I swore I would never buy and then immediately bought anyway.  

 

I threw it into Fusion, spent my usual amount of time banging my head against my desk because I'm still learning Fusion and everything is an adventure, and TADA it was done.

 

My wife assures me that it works great, but she is at least as nice a lady as Karen and might be trying to spare my feelings.

 

A big shoutout to Karen at "Just Get It Done Quilts" on YouTube for the fleeting glimpse of the plastic gadget that she and her husband created. You sparked this project, and your videos seem to calm and inspire my wife, so that's a bonus.

 

It's mostly flat, so no supports needed. I printed it in two colors to make the topography easier to see in a photo, but you do you. I'm not your dad.

 

Boost MeThis is a pretty niche item.  If you like it, a Boost would be awesome.