I’ve been thinking about all the things that quilters figure out along the way. There is a lot to learn, and as a beginner, you can’t absorb it all at once.

One example is yardage.

Occasionally a non-quilter will ask me how much fabric it takes to make a quilt. I’m not hedging when I say, “It depends.” Because it doesn’t just depend on how large the quilt is going to be, it also depends on the piecing or applique or whatever technique will be used.

Recently I was a holder/folder at a guild meeting. I was surprised at how very heavy some of the quilts were. I started thinking about yardage and patch counts and seam allowances, and I got out the calculator as I mulled it over.

For this exercise, I’ll use a queen-size quilt of 101″ x 101″. The first example, below, is a quilt made from simple 12″ half-square triangle blocks plus a 2-1/2″ border.

 

 

Here is the yardage for this queen-size quilt, figured by EQ8 (quilt design software from Electric Quilt Company):

 

 

This quilt takes almost 9 yards of fabric—8-7/8, to be exact.

If you change the half-square triangles to quarter-square triangles and rotate half of them for interest, the quilt looks like this.

 

 

Here is the yardage for quilt #2:

 

 

The amount needed has increased by 1/2 yard to 9-3/8. Not a lot, but it’s still something.

The next thing I did was to replace the quarter-squares with a Nine Patch. Here is that quilt, still the exact same size at 101″ x 101″:

 

 

Instead of each block having four patches, now each block has nine. Here is the yardage for this quilt:

 

 

It has actually gone down to a total of 9-1/8. This surprised me until I realized that patches with a diagonal seam take up extra space. Since this quilt’s patches have only straight horizontal and vertical edges, it takes a little less fabric. (If you’re familiar with the Easy Angle ruler, that’s the concept I’m talking about.)

Here is where things get interesting! For the next quilt, I took those Nine Patches and made Pinwheels inside 5 of them in each block. I alternated between white and gray backgrounds, just for kicks.

 

Look at this yardage:

 

 

It jumps up to 12 yards total! The quilt is still the exact same size, 101″ x 101″. This yardage is nearly 3 yards more than the previous quilt. Is your head spinning? Mine is.

 

 

For the final quilt, I wanted something with a lot of small pieces. I chose this Triple Irish Chain block. There are 336 patches in a 12″ block. (You wouldn’t actually make them at 12″ because the patches couldn’t be rotary cut, but don’t worry about that, it’s just an example.)

 

 

Here is the whopping yardage:

 

 

This quilt, though it’s still just 101″ x 101″, requires more than 20 yards of fabric total. Twenty and one-eighth, to be exact. That’s more than eight additional yards of fabric! Imagine what eight yards of fabric looks like. It’s a lot. 

If you’re puzzling over why quilts with more pieces take so much more fabric to cover the exact same area (101″ x 101″) in the end, it comes down to this:

Seam Allowances

Yes! That little one-quarter inch we all love/hate/applaud/loathe. One-fourth of an inch, when it must be added to all sides of 21,508 patches (the total in the final quilt, above), adds up!

Which also explains why a quilt with a bazillion tiny pieces weighs so much more than a quilt with more modest patchwork. When the patches are very small, there is virtually another entire layer of fabric under the surface because of the seam allowances.

 

Imagine the underside of the left block, which is 12″ x 12″, and where its seam allowances would be. There are big open areas with no seam allowances under them, right?

Now look at the block on the right. It’s still 12″ x 12″, but think how much seam allowance is underneath the surface.

When you consider it, the difference is striking. No wonder quilts with hundreds or thousands of tiny pieces weigh so much!

If you stuck me with to the end of this post, thank you. I love exercising my brain by wrapping it around ideas like this. I hope you do, too!

Quilt on!

I sew on HQ Stitch machines. Love ’em.