Your Quilt Block Pattern includes Squares, Triangles, Half-Square Triangles, Quarter-Square Triangles, Rectangles, Sashing, Borders and Binding. And There You are in the Middle of the Quilt Shop Trying to Figure Out How Much Fabric You Need to Make the Perfect Quilt.

Who Else Wants to Make a Quilt - With NO Complicated Math? Using this convenient little tool, you will never again need to be some kind of math whiz or guess how much fabric to buy, how many strips to cut, how wide to cut your strips or how much your fabric will cost.

Everything about quilting should be easy and fun. Enter a fabric shop and soak in the creativity and inspiration. Fabric in every color imaginable. Designs to appeal to sports fanatics, children, animal and nature lovers, and people dreaming of going to the moon. Books of patterns and instructions from the beautifully traditional to the zany contemporary and everything in between.

Shopping on line is just as fun. In the comfort of your home, in your jammies if you like, you can find your every quilting need and have it delivered right to your doorstep – rain, shine or snow. What fun! What creativity!

And then there’s all of the free stuff – especially quilt block patterns. Thousands of them, all over the web. And in books and magazines. Find a block you like, pick the fabrics for the patches in the block, decide how big your quilt will be, buy the fabric, and start to create.

But first, figure out how much of each fabric you need for the quilt. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

Imagine that you find a simple 8” square pinwheel block. A block with 8 triangles in it. Two colors. To make it easier, let’s have no sashing in the quilt, 8” borders, and let’s make it fit a queen size bed (80” by 60”). So – how much fabric of each color do you need to buy? Sounds like a question from a math teacher, doesn't it? Already we're starting to sweat.

Determined to make the quilt, we keep going.

Pinwheel Block
How much fabric do you need to make 48 pinwheel blocks? You will figure it out in a snap without knowing any math using the FabriCalc.

First figure out how many blocks you need –

60” across minus two 8” borders = 60” – 16” = 44.” To make 8” blocks (finished size) that would be 44 divided by 8 = 5 ½ blocks across. 80” long minus two 8” borders = 80” – 16” = 64.” 64 divided by 8 = 8 blocks down.

To make it even, we’ll have 6 blocks across and 8 blocks down, making 48 blocks in all.

Ok, now to figure out how many triangles. Each block has 8 half square triangles, so 48 times 8 = 384. That was the easy part. Now to figure out how much fabric to buy.

If you are anything like me, at this point, you throw a dart at the board, pick a number, go to the fabric store and buy 2 yards of each fabric, and hope for the best.

Forget the math! It takes all the fun out of planning a quilt.

Is there another unfinished quilt in your closet? The backing fabric you want to use is too small, and you haven’t found the right fabric to add to make it the right size. Have you said to yourself, someday I'll find it. If only I had known exactly how much fabric to buy in the first place, it would be done today. But I just guessed how much fabric I needed..

Last year, I bought the Electric Quilt software which allows me to design a quilt and it calculates the fabric I will need for the quilt. It’s really quite wonderful software, and I have used it to make many of the patterns posted on the Free Patterns page.

Thing is, the quilt needs to be designed using the software, and if I have a drawing and don’t need templates or any of the other things the software provides, it seems like a lot of time to spend creating the quilt in the software just to get the fabric requirements, so I pull out my more convenient, but not-so-accurate pencil and paper to do the estimating. Sometimes I get it right, and other times, well, you know the story.

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This handy, dandy tool will figure out exactly how much of each color fabric you need for the blocks, borders and backing of your quilt. It won’t tell you what colors to pick or blocks to sew, but once you have your colors and blocks picked, it will tell you how much fabric you need to buy. You just tell it how many blocks you will make and how big each one will be, and it will do the rest.

With a few simple keystrokes, it does the math and shows you how much you need. And it does the math in yards, inches, and meters, so quilters anywhere in the world can use this brainy calculator.

Let’s go back to our queen size 8” pinwheel block quilt with 8” borders. Using the FabriCalc, just enter the length of the side of each patch in your block, the number of half-square triangles, and the FabriCalc tells you the number of yards of fabric, the number of strips, and how wide to cut each strip. In just a blink.

AND, entering the information is just like talking to the calculator. It’s unbelieveable!

This calculator is so smart, it will:

* store information for up to 6 different fabrics in your quilt
* convert from inches to metrics and back again – now that’s something great for our overseas quilters
* tell you how many blocks you can get from a specific piece of fabric
* determine the yardage for corner and side triangles
* estimate the cost for your fabric
* and much more

From the simple to the complex, the FabriCalc takes all of the guesswork out of figuring out how much fabric you need for your quilt.

You save money, you save time, and you save the aggravation of running out of fabric.

Who Thought This Up? And What Do They Know About Quilting?

This is not some fly-by-night calculator that was created by some guy who cuts wood or pipes and doesn’t understand about diamonds, triangles, half-square triangles, quarter-square triangles, diagonals, and all sorts of fancy cuts.

Well, it may have been created by an engineer who made a calculator for a guy who cuts wood and pipes, but this calculator was designed specifically for non-engineering quilters and works for all of the complex (and simple) cuts that we quilters want to make.

And, it’s not like the calculator my engineer son uses – with all kinds of symbols and weird-looking things that mean something if you are a rocket scientist. Nope. This calculator is user-friendly, made with quilters in mind.

It does have a lot of buttons on it. But, they are color-coded so you can see which ones to use. For example, you enter the length and width of your quilt, and how wide your border is using the red buttons in the top row. Then push the “QuiltYdg” button, and it tells you how much total yardage you need for your quilt.

Tell it how many blocks are in your quilt – the number of blocks across and down, and whether you are using sashing (fabric in between your blocks). Press the “BlockYDG” button, and see how much fabric you need for your blocks.

And next the squares. Use the purple buttons to enter the size of the squares in your blocks and whether they are simple squares, half-square triangles, quarter-square triangles, or diamonds.

The little rectangle display box at the top shows all of the calculations – a digital display, for the techies in our group. Keep your calculations in memory, or delete them, your choice. Store calculations for multiple fabrics. Convert between yardage and metric calculations.

You will save time, money and aggravation by using this fantastic tool.

* No more wasted hours with paper and pencil (and eraser) adding, subtracting, multiplying, then dividing by the width of the fabric
* Arrive at the quilt shop with an exact list of fabric requirements for your quilt
* No more tears when you realize that you have run out of that perfect fabric and the quilt shop has too

And you can make better use of your stash. You will be able to measure your piece of fabric and know if it really is big enough.

I'm a relatively new quilter, so I'm probably not using it as much as some. But what I can tell you is that is has helped when purchasing fabric. I always tended to "buy extra just in case". While my stash probably isn't growing as fast anymore, my budget is healthier!                                                                Donna  R.                 Memphis, TN

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