HOW DO I?

Count block pieces for yardage calculator

Because QuiltSandwich is a planning tool for materials and not a design tool, designs need to be broken down into pieces to enter into the yardage calculator.

Once your design is finished, you know:
  • which blocks you’ll be using 
  • how many you need

For this example we'll use a quilt design created using the  graph paper app QuiltPaper. This is one of the free patterns on this web site that can be downloaded into QuiltSandwich. It is the Little Pioneer pattern.

This design is a 42" x 42” baby quilt created with:
  • 9 — 12 inch square finished width blocks made with four 4-patch units
  • 3" border

1


Count the unique pieces in each block
In order to calculate yardage we will group together pieces with the same shape and color and consider them identical.

Each block is identical and made up of:
  • 4 white 3" squares
  • 4 red     3" squares
  • 8 white 3" Half Square Triangle (HST)
  • 8 red     3" HST

To get the total number of pieces needed for the quilt, multiply the number of each piece needed in a block by the number of blocks —
  • 4 white squares x 9 blocks = 36 white squares
  • 4 red squares     x 9 blocks = 36 red squares
  • 8 white HST        x 9 blocks = 72 white HST
  • 8 red HST            x 9 blocks = 72 red HST


2



Enter the size and count for each piece into the yardage calculator
In this example:
  1. Set the Yardage Calculator to Rectangle or Square.
  2. Fabric width FatQ.
  3. Piece dimension 3".
  4. Number of pieces 36.
  5. 'Save' calculation to the project.
  6. Tap scissors to assess the cutting diagram for the 2 FatQs.

Repeat this calculation for the other fabric.

For the triangles, set the Yardage Calculator to HST and number of pieces to 72 to calculate the yardage for the triangles.