How to Quilt: Calculate Fabric Requirements with FabriCalc

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.

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.

Many years ago, I decided to hand piece and hand quilt a queen size Broken Star quilt. With pattern book in hand, I confidently marched off to the fabric store. It took hours to pick the perfect fabrics – peach and pastel blue was the color scheme, and 7 was the number of different fabrics needed for the quilt.

The supply list was provided, and I was sure I had enough of each fabric to complete the quilt.

I spent hours cutting individual diamonds with my sharp Gingher scissors. (This was before rotary cutters.) Then came more hours marking the backside of each diamond with sewing lines using a cardboard template. (This was before I thought about using ¼” masking tape as a sewing line.)

One by one the diamonds were sewn together to make a bigger diamond, then the bigger diamonds were sewn together to create a star, then triangles and squares were added between the points of the star, and the broken pieces of the star were added. And two years later, the center portion of the blue and peach Broken Star quilt was complete.

The supply list proved to be an accurate estimate of the fabric requirements for the star, so I proceeded with confidence that I would have plenty of fabric to finish the entire quilt.

The borders were next. No problem, I thought, the border fabric was waiting to be cut and sewn on. Borders number one and two went on without a hitch. Plenty of fabric. I cut the first two strips for the outside border and sewed them on. Lookin’ good! After 2½ years, just two more border strips to go.

I measured the quilt to cut the final border, and then measured the fabric that was left for the borders. And then I sat down to cry. The piece of fabric was 24” too short! A crummy two feet. The final border was supposed to be 6” wide, and without it, the quilt would be too small for the bed – it would hang about 5” down the side, not covering up much of the side of the mattress, and looking really bad.

I searched all of my fabric stashes, hoping somehow that there were some little scraps of the fabric that would miraculously appear. But that didn’t happen.

“Maybe not all was lost,” I thought. It was just a solid light blue fabric, the store must have more. So with sample in hand, I headed to the quilt shop where I had purchased the fabric. Bummer – the solid blues they had were too different. Just enough off to look like they didn’t match, and not enough off to be a good contrast. They had long before run out of that bolt of fabric.

Fortunately there was another quilt shop in my town, so I made a mad dash to see what they had. No luck there, either. Not to be thwarted, I tried the local fabric shops – like JoAnn’s and others that had somewhat limited supplies of solid cotton fabric, but fabric nonetheless.

No luck. I spent three days scouring every shop imaginable to find a match for my plain blue fabric. Not wanting to spend another 2 ½ years looking, I contemplated my choices, and finally decided to add squares of a different fabric the ends of the outside border strips to make them long enough. Problem solved, I sewed them on and the quilt top was done.

I would have paid anything to have had something to accurately estimate the fabric requirements for my quilt.

There is another unfinished quilt in my closet. The backing fabric I want to use is too small, and I haven’t found the right fabric to add to make it the right size. 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.

This is so Easy, it's Like Saying What you Want then Having the Answer Appear Right Before Your Very Eyes

As my daughter, Stephanie, and I strolled around the Houston Quilt Show, we stumbled across the solution to these fabric shortage problems. There at a booth was the Quilter’s FabriCalc.

Right there in Houston was the solution to every quilters fabric estimating problems.

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 also tell it how many blocks you will make and how big each one will be.

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!

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.

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.

Just imagine! Now we quilters can travel anywhere in the world, and use this handy device to buy fabric in quilt stores and know whether it will be enough to make that king size quilt we’ve dreamed about making with the fabulous batik purchased in Indonesia.

Speaking of traveling with the FabriCalc. This handy tool measures only about 3” wide, 5¾” high and ¾” thick. Pretty convenient for tucking in your purse. And, that includes a small pocket size instruction guide that fits in a secret compartment of the calculator. Carry it with you or find a small, empty corner in your luggage.

Oh, it comes with a full size instruction guide, too. You can get the instruction guide on the company’s website. And now, there is video instruction on their site:

In this video series, Susie, a real quilter, shows how easy it is to use the Quilter's FabriCalc.

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.

This isn’t just some cheap calculator developed in somebody’s garage. (Although these days, it could happen that way!) It’s been developed by Calculated Industries who makes calculating devices for the contractors, real estate and mortgage people, and people who do stuff for fun. They make 6 different calculators for construction projects; a portable digital tool that has 72 different built-in scales; an electrical wiring calculator that tells you how many miles of wire you need to build a building, and that’s just for the construction industry. That means they have a lot of experience making calculators designed for a specific purpose.

Their products include solutions for people who sail boats, cook in the kitchen, edit videos, fix things around the house, and now for Quilters! The bottom line is that these folks know what they are doing.

And the company has been around for a long time. “Founded in 1978, Calculated Industries (CI) is the country's leading manufacturer and marketer of specialty calculators and digital measuring tools. For over 25 years, our products have helped more than 5 million busy professionals work better, faster, and more efficiently with easy-to-use, portable solutions.” (From the Calculated Industries website.)

When I saw it and tested it, I fell in love. And Stephanie did too. I wanted one of my very own, and Stephanie couldn’t wait to get her hands on one.

Special Bonus Instruction Guide
Exclusively from www.How-to-Quilt.com
Available nowhere else on Earth

For those of us who struggled with the FabriCalc or even gave up, there’s great news. A few weeks ago, I spent about an hour on the phone with the quilting expert at Calculated Industries. She works with the engineers who designed and programmed this fantastic quilting tool.

During that time, she walked me through all of the critical calculations and explained exactly how to figure out how much fabric you need for a quilt, how many strips to cut for each fabric in your quilt, and how wide to cut the strips. She translated the “engineer-ese” into quilting terms that even I can understand.

And, it’s taken a while, but now it’s all documented in the informative Step-by-Step style you have come to rely on www.How-to-Quilt.com for. Full color photographs, scans of the FabriCalc as you will see it when you do the calculations, and detailed but easy-to-read instructions.

This takes a quilt that has half-square triangles, quarter square triangles, rectangles, squares, sashing, borders and binding, and walks you through the calculation for each patch shape. By the end of the 31 pages, you have specific examples (and pictures) of every calculation you will need to make a quilt using those shapes.

And, you will be able to use those instructions for your own quilt, not just this example.

Because we like to share resources, this fantastic, easy-to-understand, Step-by-Step Instruction Guide is yours FREE with your order of a FabriCalc. This Instruction Guide is worth its weight in gold, since some of us quilters couldn't figure out how to use this calculator before now.

The Instruction Guide is an electronic download, so you will receive an email with a link to download the Guide, and you can glance through the pages and be ready to jump right in when your FabriCalc arrives in your mailbox.

When our first 60 arrived, they sold out in just 3 days. The supplier air shipped our next order, and those went out the door as fast as they came in. Once again, because of this manufacturer's special rebate offer, we have a limited suppy. They were able to ship us only 48 calculators! I wish I had more, but I don't. These are so popular, I'm sure that this supply will be gone in days.

Order yours today to make sure you get your FabriCalc and the FREE Instruction Guide without further delay at the low price of $39.95, plus $5.00 shipping in the US. (International shipping is an additional $2.50.) And, just mail in the rebate coupon to the manufacturer, and you get a check for $10 in the return mail.

And speaking of price - believe me, this is a fantastic price for such a complex quilting tool. I know, you can get a simple calculator at the 99cents Only Store for 99 cents. But it won't tell you how much fabric to buy, how many strips to cut, how wide to cut the strips, and how much the fabric will cost.

To do all of that, you need a calculator as complex as my son's engineering calculator yet easy enough to understand. The calculator he got for high school math cost $112.99, and we paid that price "because he needed it for school." Now he has a really fancy one that cost around $149.99. It can't do what the FabriCalc does, I can't figure out how to work it, and he's not using it to create an heirloom that will preserve our family history!

Still having trouble thinking about spending $39.95 on a quilting tool? Think about how much money you will save on fabric. At $7.99 per yard, it's just five yards, and that's an average fabric. If you use Indonesian batiks and other specialty fabrics priced at $9.50 per yard, you'll save even more. Heck, you could easily save the cost of your FabriCalc on just one bed size quilt. Two at the most.

Why is it that sometimes we quilters discount the value of having good tools? Guys don't seem to have a problem spending $99.00 on an electric drill, and then another $119.95 on a battery pack, just to make a few holes. $39.95 is a tiny investment with hundreds of dollars payback for years to come. And you can carry it with you when you travel. Picture him carrying his electric drill to Tokyo.

You deserve the best tools for the creation of your family heirlooms that will live for generations.

Be the first in your family, neighborhood, and quilting group to own a FabriCalc and accurately and easily figure out how much fabric you need for your next project. Order yours today, and never more will you run out of fabric or have yards and meters left over. You may become the most valuable resource for quilters in your town. You definitely will be known as a clever quilter for investing in this valuable resource.

And, consider your quilting friends and family. Surprise them with a FabriCalc. This tool is so valuable that your quilting friends will be begging to borrow yours. Don't take a chance that they will lose it or just forget to give it back to you. Make their birthday, anniversary, or any other special day by giving them their very own FabriCalc.

It’s easy to order, just Click here to claim your Quilter's FabriCalc. Your order is processed by a third party on a SECURE SERVER where your credit card information is kept confidential, and their processing meets the highest security standards in the industry. Get yours today before they disappear. You can also pay by check or money order. Or send a fax with your order information.

Penny Halgren
www.How-to-Quilt.com
Inspiration and Education for Beginning Quilters