The Companion Carpet Bag Sew Along over on Mrs H’s blog is well underway. If you haven’t checked it out yet, head on over and see where we’re at, and the awesome prizes up for grabs! I promised a quick piping tutorial, so here it is. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so I’m including some really great piping tutorials as well. For the purposes of the Carpet Bag, you only need one small piece, so I’ll show you that here. The tutorials I’m linking to show you how to make proper piping from bias binding (and how to make that too), which can be used to pipe a whole bag, or a larger, curved area.

If you only need a small piece for a straight edge, you don’t need to cut on the bias, which can save you some fabric. To start, you’ll need cording; I like 5/32″ cording, or even smaller. You’ll also need a zipper foot or a piping foot. Wonder tape will help, but isn’t necessary.

1. Cut a strip of fabric the length you’ll need by 1.5″, plus a matching length of cording
2. Place a strip of wonder tape along wrong side of one long edge
3. Place cording along wrong side, in centre of strip
4. Fold in half, matching long edges, and with cording in between, pin or clip
5. Using zipper foot, baste cording in place, snug, but not too tight.

Alicia from Swoon made a very thorough and great tutorial here. 

Crazy Little Projects has a quick and easy to understand tutorial here.