Quilting and Math

I'm just sewing the squares together and marking for the next few days, so the posts are going to be a little more varied than just where I am on the quilts.

Sewing involves quite a bit of math.  You have your standard measurement problems that help you to decide how big to make something or how much fabric you need to by.  There's also way that you cut a piece of flat fabric to fit it together with another piece of flat fabric to make something that fits over a three dimensional object (usually a person) is an interesting mathematical puzzle.  Take sleeves for instance.  Look at your shirt, hold your arm out to your side.  Pretty much it looks like a rectangle was cut and sewn to the other rectangles that make up the body of your shirt.  But, the basic sleeve shape is really this:

I remember being pretty surprised by that shape when I made my first garment with a sleeve.  Of course I was only 12 or 13 and hadn't really though about it, but even as an adult I don't think it is obvious that in order to get sleeves you should cut something out that looks like that.  Of course the apparent rectangles that make up your shirt, aren't really rectangles, which I'm sure you've guessed by now.

Quilts are pretty straight forward in their layout, doesn't really seem like much math is going on with my quilt, just the basic, what size how much fabric to purchase sorts of things, but in the planning stages we had an interesting puzzle to solve.  I laid out my plan based on the original photograph I found.

I simply replaced the fabric in this quilt with the ones that I had picked for my quilt.  For instance the blue with stars on it replaced the black squares, the stripes replaced the blue with thatch marks, etc.

That was before I found out about the trick to make the squares.  Once I realized that making the nine patches and then cutting them, was so going to be much easier that piecing all the squares and rectangles together individually, I needed to figure out how to construct the nine patches so that I could get the resulting squares with a minimum of waste.

I figured that who ever made the green quilt had made 9 nine-patches and cut them into 36 squares and then had one that was wasted.  So we went to work trying to figure out the patches.

To be continued...