You’ve made it to the end of your bias tape. What now?

Let’s look first at what I usually see people do, which is often some variation of the above. I think people get to the end, go ”?????” and then try to flip it to the inside, with varying degrees of success. The back side will ALWAYS try to escape, and getting it to end exactly where your fabric does is pretty much impossible. Even in the best case, you will be left with an ugly gaping hole in the bottom.

Most of the time people will:

A) ignore this
B) stitch across it like a maniac (<---what I used to do)
C) glue it (<---a “one way door” decision; fast but messy)
D) hand stitch it closed (<---why D:)

A and B look bad, and with C you’ll often have an untidy outcome + drying time (fabric glue) or crunchy bits (hot glue). There is no point in doing D, because if you are that concerned about it looking good, you should save yourself time - and get a far cleaner finish - by doing it with your sewing machine as shown below.

If your garment is lined, you should stay-stitch the fabric and lining together along the edge first so that they don’t slip around while you’re trying to attach your bias tape. (This is the red line of stitching in the photo.) Lay your tape out, and stitch exactly to the edge of the fabric. Make sure to back stitch.

Now flip your tape over like so. It’ll look like this from the side.

Take the top of your tape, and fold it down over top of your fabric edge, forming a tasty fabric sandwich. Pin it in place.

Now flip the whole thing over. (I have transferred the pins over to the other side of the fabric here so it can lie flat.) What’s the difference between the back and the front? Well, not much…except that you can see your previous line of stitching on this side, which will come in handy here in a second.

Stitch across the end of the tape, making sure not to catch your garment fabric in your stitching.

The closer you can get to it without actually catching it, the better. If your fabric is very thick, using a zipper foot will help you get nice and close to the edge. You can also use a hammer to flatten the fabric fibers before stitching.

Yay! It’s stitched. As you can see, the previous line of stitching will help you judge how close you can get to things. The more precise you are, the better it will look!

Trim your seam allowance. Use your adorable point turner (or similarly pointy device) to poke the corner into submission. Flip everything to the inside.

Now it will look like this on the front…like this on the back…

…and like this on the side. It’ll be more or less invisible when you use matching thread and a small stitch length. At this point, you can secure the back in whatever manner you prefer. (Slipstitch it to the lining, topstitch it, etc.)

Confession: I used random strips of straight grain fabric I ripped off a scrap of cotton for the above photos, but you should use real bias tape (which is cut on the diagonal) for this sort of thing where possible. The bias cut gives it a slight degree of flex which allows the whole assembly to lay much more smoothly.