How much fabric do I need to buy for a king size quilt

How do you determine how much fabric to buy for king size quilt project?

Reply

The amount of fabric needed to make a king sized quilt will depend upon the quilt pattern or design that you choose.

If you're using a purchased quilt pattern, you'll find the fabric requirements on the back of the envelope.

Unfortunately, in the quilting industry there are no industry standards to which patterns are written. I belong to a quilt designers' online group and there are frequent discussions as to how much extra should be built into the pattern requirements to make a specific quilt. There is a wide range of opinion in the group. Some make the computation based on the number of full strips needed rounded up to the nearest 1/4 yard for a particular fabric...others round up to the nearest 1/8 yard. Some allow for one miscut strip.

One pattern I purchased from a well-known designer left me with over 8 extra yards for 89" square quilt that used just 4 fabrics. Needless to say, I was not happy.

So for now, if I'm going to work on a large quilt that I'm buying fabric specifically for, I'll purchase the pattern and then compute the yardage myself. Once bitten, twice shy I guess.

Let the computer do the work

If you don't like to do the math, and either like to design quilts or are comfortable using a computer, I highly recommend the Electric Quilt software. 7 is the current version. A separate version is available for MAC.

You can design your quilt in the software and with a click of a key, the program will spit out the fabric requirements for you. I've used this several times to confirm the calculations I made by hand with excellent results.

If you've purchased a pattern, create a computerized version of it in Electric Quilt.

You can even 'color' with your own fabric choices and get a feel for how your quilt will look before you've cut your first fabric strip.

To get fabric yardage, go to the 'Print' menu, click 'Fabric Yardage' and the program does the rest. You are able to print a color/fabric coded key with yardage estimates for each fabric.

It's slick as a whistle!

Don't forget to double check...

...that the quilt size will truly fit the bed it's intended for.

Take the time to check that the measurements of finished quilt provided on the pattern envelope actually fit your bed properly. Since there are no industry standards, sometimes the finished size of the quilt most closely approximates a certain size quilt (king, queen, etc.) but it won't cover your particular mattress and bedroom set the way you've envisioned.

You can print our Worksheet for Calculating Your Bed Quilt Sizes to help you compute the dimensions of a quilt that will fit your bed to your liking.

I hope this information is helpful to you.

Piecefully,

Julie Baird
Editor

This article was printed from Generations-Quilt-Patterns.com