Crafty Math

Have you ever dreamed of a craft project?  A few nights before Christmas, I dreamt of this quilt.  There was a little boy with curly blonde hair and blue eyes wrapped up in it, sitting in some green grass, grinning.  And that was it. 

Of course, after I got my sewing machine I had to make this quilt - though I've never quilted before and have very little idea of what I'm doing.  I bought the basic materials to make the top - yellows and oranges for the center of the flowers,  and blue for the background, and different prints for different flowers. I even nominated fabric from my gigantic stash of fabric to serve as flowers.

Today, I sat down and drew out templates, deciding how big my pieces will be.  I want to make a queen-sized quilt, so I'll need a lot of fabric.  I don't have all the stuff I need (batting, or backing, for example) but I figured this is going to be a long project, so I can buy more stuff as I need it.  No point in spending mucho dollars on something I won't use for ten or eleven months, I thought.

Yes - I bet understand quilting takes a lot of time. I thought about this as I hunched over on the floor of my childhood bedroom and measured and cut.  Hey, maybe I should cut all of the pieces first, that seemed to be a methodical way of doing things.

So I took out my paper and pencil, and did some calculations.

To make a 100x100 quilt, I will need:

40 edge pieces

100 center peices (the center of the flower)

80 petal pieces

That's not hard math. That's 220 squares!  I'm a little intimidated.  I think the actually sewing is going to be a ways off, while I contemplate how I'm going to tackle this task. I think it's kind of funny that I decided to do this quilt with squares with a ten inch diagonal, instead of squares with a 5 inch diagonal, which was my other idea. That would be even more squares!