Originally Posted by
JenelTX
I have an idea for a quilt made entirely of squares... well, almost entirely. Some of the squares will be comprised of half-square triangles. I need to know what size those triangles need to be so that when I sew them together with a 1/4-inch seam, they'll result in a 2.5-inch square to match all the other squares in the quilt. I know there has to be a relatively easy way to understand this stuff, but it's not intuitive for me at all.
I went to Amazon and searched for quilt math to see if there's a book that can help me understand how to figure out such vexing word problems. LOL (It's been a looooong time since high school math!) I didn't find anything.
Can anyone recommend a book that helps you figure out sizes when you're not following a pattern?
There's a book called "Taking the Math out of Patchwork." I can' find mine right now so I don't know if that's in there or not. The simple rule for HST is add 7/8ths to the size you want the finished square to be. The finished size is the size after it's sewn into the quilt. So if the plain squares are 2.5 before sewing them into a quilt and 2 inches after sewing them into a quilt you cut the squares for a same size HST 2 7/8ths. But cutting eighths is annoying so just round up to 1 inch bigger and square up the HST.