Estimating Fabric Amounts
I said I wasn't going to do it, but I couldn't resist... I bought three Moda Fruitcake charm packs on eBay. I'm so excited! I thought it would be fun to make a Christmas quilt during the holiday season this year, so that we could pull it out and put it on our bed every Christmas from now on.
So... I decided to come up with my own quilt pattern, pictured below. It's very basic. The diamonds and corner squares represent the five-inch charm pack squares I'll get in the Moda shipment. I ordered 3 charm packs, so I'll get 126 fabric squares. I'm using 124 of them in this pattern, including the four corner squares. (It's a king-size quilt.)
What I want to know is, how do you estimate the amount of fabric that you will need for various parts of a pattern you create yourself? I came up with 3.5 yards of the dark brown in this picture, 4 yards of the lighter brown, and 1.5 yards for the green inner border. Does that seem reasonable? Do you know of a website that has a tutorial on calculating yardage needed?