I took both quilts to the sewing day for my modern quilt guild. It was nice to just have hand work to do for a change. No lugging a big machine in from the car to the meeting room. I grabbed my pins, snips, thread, needle and a couple of those little leather thimble dots before heading out. I got here right in time and was one of the first to arrive. Got myself set up and started out to stitch, happily greeting people as they arrived. One of the ladies, the lovely Stephanie Mullen had not brought anything to work on. She offered to help me bind the charity quilt. I set her up with needle and thread and she borrowed snips and pins to get sewing.
There was one small problem. I only had about 10 straight pins. Not enough to share to do binding on two quilts. Stephanie asked around and another quilter, Kimberli loaned us these two boxes of binding clips. I had never used the, always opting for either straight pins or metal hair clips to hold the binding in place as I sewed it down. I asked if I could try them and I was immediately convinced how wonderful these WONDER CLIPS by Clover really are!
They come in sets of 7 or 8 or a 50 pack in their own little storage box. They are very small, made of red and clear plastic, similar to a clothes pins with a metal clamp. They have a rounded side and a flat side to them. The flat side is clear plastic and has these wonderful hash marks them so you can use these to ensure your bindings are straight as an arrow while sewing. The reverse is red plastic and more rounded, especially useful to ensure your bindings are "full". Those of you that had entered your quilts in shows to be judged know that this is something that most quilt show judges will look at and comment on if the quilt edges do not fill up the bindings clean to the edges. While this is normally not a problem for me, these Wonder Clips make it so easy to ensure your binding goes on straight.
The best feature of these clips are that you will never get stuck by pins again nor snag your skin, clothes, furniture because there are no sharp edges. I cannot tell you how many times I have stuck myself to the point of bleeding while binding quilts. No more ouchies! While I haven't tried to use them yet to apply binding on the machine, I am told they work great for this as well.
While these Wonder Clips may be considered expensive at a list price around $32, they are the perfect item to buy when on sale or when you have a 50-60% off coupon to use. I was fortunate enough to have a 60% off coupon that expired yesterday plus my teacher 10% off card, so I was able to get them at the big J store for almost 70% off. I was thrilled to save on something I wanted but didn't want to pay full price to buy. While I believe in always supporting my LQS whenever possible, this was one of those rare times where I felt the need to save some bucks and shop at the J store. Now I can go and spend the money I saved at my favorite LQS! Win, WIN! I also think that these would make a great grab bag exchange gift if you can score them on sale with a coupon like I did.
Thanks to Kimberli MacKay for the ability to try out a new notion. And a special a thanks to Stephanie Mullen for working on binding the batik charity quilt. It's great to have friends that share and sew.
And here is a photo of the finished quilts....
#wonderclips #quiltingbindingtools #Cloverclips #lovetolongarm #easybinding
I want to note that this endorsement is of my own free will and I was not compensated by Clover to write this review.
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