Behind the seams | bindings a.c. style

I would pretty much never take long ways around things without it equating to be a short cut. 

Here's my method to speed the sewing up. 

1) use store bought T-shirt hems for binding. It's already the width needed, it's already against the fabric grain. It's already ironed correctly. 

2) mark the dots from the ac grid across the whole binding. 

I do this because I do like it all even. Secondly you can get amazing results without needing to practice. It can take hours to master a new stitch or get back into a stitch that you haven't used in a long time. The grid helps me to not have to think. It really does speed things up. 

Mark the binding before pinning the binding onto the garment. 

3) After careful placement of the binding, which is easiest to secure onto the garment by pinning, you can just sew straight onto it. But honestly I find it faster to baste the binding then remove the pins. When you're dealing with crazy ass stitch such as rosebud stitch, or any stitch that you haven't wrapped your head around, having additional pins to snag are just a time killer. You can baste all the binding on the garment (eg both arm holes and neck line) and then not worry about being too delicate while manoeuvring the garment, since all stretchy areas are now basted with straight stitch. 

Now you can focus on handling the thread to do something beautiful instead of fighting with other miscellaneous issues.