How to Make Your Own Piping

Piping is a great way to add some extra visual interest to a project. And today I'm gonna show you how you can use some store-bought piping, or if you want something a little thicker or something a little different, maybe different fabric, I'm gonna show you how you can make your own piping. So a couple of things to start with, this is regular piping that you can buy in a craft store. And a lot of times maybe the color isn't something that you'd like or you want it to be a little bit thicker. So what I've done here is I just sort of taken this apart a little bit so you can see how big of cord is used to make piping. And if you want something that's a little bit bigger to maybe show a little more on your project, you can actually make your own piping. So what I've done here is purchased some courting and this is actually from Walmart or any kind of store like that just sells drapes. This is the type of courting you would use to make braiding or anything like that that just hold your drapes back. So just bought some of this and I bought it in a neutral color because I don't want anything like a black or maybe a really dark brown that could show through the fabric that I'm going to sew around it. But I'm gonna use this to make my own custom piping. So I want to have a strip of fabric and this is probably a little wider than I need but I like to give myself a little bit of extra wiggle room when I'm wrapping my fabric around my cord and stitching it. And then I can always trim it down to the size I need it to be. So what I want to do is just cut some cord that's longer than your fabric, and the reason you want it longer is because you want to have sort of an edge to be able to hold on to while you're stitching. One thing you do want to do, though, before you make any sort of cuts in this courting is use some tape and wrap some tape around the edge where you're going to be cutting. And the reason you want to do this is because if you don't and you cut into it then it's just going to immediately start unraveling. So just some take some tape, wrap it around like so and then cut right through the middle of it. That way you have some tape on the edge that you're going to be using and is secured this end that's attached to whatever you want to use for the next time. So I have my courting and my fabric and I'm ready to get stitching. Now you can use just your regular machine, regular straight stitch, and they do make something called a piping foot. And that actually is a foot that has a little groove on the bottom that will hold the piping in place while you stitch it and make it pretty easy but it doesn't come standard with every machine. So if you maybe don't make piping a lot or don't want to purchase an extra foot for your machine I'm actually going to use a zipper foot. And what I like about this is when you're, just similar to when you're selling a zipper, you can get really close to the edge of where you're stitching with this foot. So that's what makes it really easy to use this when we're stitching our piping. So I'm going to go ahead and change this out real quick, put this onto our machine, and we're ready to get started stitching our piping. So what I have here is my courting, I'm just going to wrap my fabric around it, just sort of hold it in place with my fingers as I get started. And I'm just going to place this under my presser foot and I'm just going to put like one stitch in sort of get the needle down, hold it in place so I can make some adjustments with this half of it without it sliding around. So what I'm going to do is just make sure the courting is folded in the center of our fabric here. And you can use your finger to see you know exactly where your courting is when you're stitching. And you're just going to stitch right along the edge, maybe stopping every couple inches or so make sure your fabric is still folded in half and that you're stitching right along the edge of your courting. And just go all the way down. Again, just going a little bit at a time. Don't pull on this other end of the courting that's sticking out of the fabric. You want to make sure it's adjusted and you can do that. But if you pull too hard, you're actually going to pull the courting all the way out of the fabric you just stitched. And then you just have to start over. So you don't want to do that. Stitch right off the edge. And just like that, we've made our own piece of piping. And you can see here that in comparison to this piping there's way more fabric sticking out here than there is here. I like that when I making my own custom piping 'cause I haven't decided what kind of project I'm going to add it into yet. And say I made this and I want to add it to some sort of clothing pattern and the pattern is already written to have five eighth inch seam allowances. Then what I would do is measure this and trim it to five eighths inch. But if I may be going to put this in some sort of home deck project that I'm creating I like to use half inch seam allowances. So then I would measure and cut this at half inch. So I like to just have it bigger than I need and then cut it accourtingly. So just like that, you can make some simple piping. Now, depending on your project you may eventually have to connect your piping together from one inch to the other. And I'm going to show you how to do that real quick. It's really pretty easy. There's just a couple of things that you want to make sure you do to really give it a nice finished edge to it rather than anything overlapping. So say I'm working on a pillow or something where I have to come all the way around the edge and then somehow attach these two ends of piping. I don't want to just overlap it like this because it will be sort of a double thickness of that courting. And that really does kind of stand out on your project and you don't want to have that especially if you're putting it in something like clothing. So what you want to do is on one of your edges of the piping, you're going to undo the stitching just a little ways. And with the store-bought piping they do have a little bit longer of a stitch length. So really be careful when you're pulling the stitches 'cause you can end up pulling it a lot farther than you want to. So just give it a little tug and pull out about an inch or of the stitching. I want to open it up. I'm going to take this courting and I'm actually going to cut it off just like that. So then I have the still piece of piping that I'm going to use but the courting is back in there about an inch. You don't want to go too far. You don't need to go that far. So then I'm gonna take and fold over this edge like this because I want to have a nice finished edge here. So that's what that fold is going to give us. Then we take our other piece and we match it up, lay that down here, match it up to where our two pieces of courting come together. By that I mean right like this, you can see there's one end of the cord right here. And here's the end that we cut off and we want to make sure they're just butted up to each other and not overlapping. And we take and we fold this back over like so. Then we're going to take this over to our machine and we're going to stitch what we just undid. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to put a pin in there to hold it because it is, there's very little fabric there and I know as soon as I let go it's going to come undone and I'll have to put it all back together again. So what I want to do, put a little pin in there just until I get it under my foot. Now where I have it now, I can sew this without hitting my pin. If you somehow put the pin in there to where you're going to stitch over it, make sure you remove it before you're stitching because you don't want to stitch over that pin because that could bend your needle or break your needle or something like that. So have this all in place and I'm just going to do a quick little backstitch, make sure everything's secure, and I'm gonna sew right along where I took that stitching up. I'm actually going to make sure I'm right at the edge and just keep stitching. And the stitch right off the edge here of our one piece of piping go right onto the other and sort of overlap the stitching a little bit. And then I'll go ahead and do a back stitch just to make sure that everything is nice and secure. Take this out and clip off all my little threads. Take my pin out of there. And you can see now we have a nice finished edge of our piping. We still only have one thickness of courting. Nothing is overlapped. We have a nice finished edge with this fold. And if this were somewhere in your project you probably wouldn't even be able to tell where one piece of piping started and one ended and the next one started, which is what you want to have when you're doing a project, a nice finished look to it. So whether you buy pre-made piping or you use some scraps of fabric you have, buy some courting and make your own. I hope you'll give it a try and put it in your next project.