Wednesday 17 February 2010

Fractious fractions

I have never been one for fractions. I did quite well at math during school but fractions and their decimal counterpart percentages always bothered me. They just never made any sense. Unfortunately they still don't. Now I have taken an interest in patchwork this lack of knowledge and understanding is finally inhibiting me. Add to that a serious lack of 3D spatial awareness and you have a recipe for many mistakes.

Cue my latest one. I took a quilt block and decided to make it bigger. This way I only needed 4 of them to make the size quilt I want to do. I decided I needed to make them 3 times bigger so I multiplied all the measurements by 3. Ah this was my gargantuan mistake. All the measurements include seam allowance. By just multiplying I have also multiplied the seam allowance by 3. Ah indeed.

But with much help from Spadger it i fixed. I am going to continue sewing as I was which will leave me with lots of square that are too big which I will then cut down to the right size. This is a little bit more hard work than getting the measurement right before sewing but I have done one lot already. By doing it this way I can ensure that they are all reasonably identical.

Note to self; next time take measurements, remove seam allowance, multiply, add seam allowance back on.

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