Hope Valley - a finished quilt top and some quilt math-

My Hope Valley quilt top is finished and is everything I hoped for. With every square I added to the top it gotten better and better.

Faith's Saddle up pattern was the perfect choice and I am happy to move on to the difficult decision of the quilt back. Lately I have spent way to much time thinking of quilt backs. I am actually contemplating  a solid quilt back for a change but I will probably change my mind a dozend times over the next days.


My quilt is larger than the original from Faith that is 68" as I wanted the finished size to be around 80" square. And because this quilt is done on the diagonal you need to calculate the diagonal width of a square to be able to calculate its overall size.

And the formula for this is:

The diagonal of a square = sqrt(2) x the length (or width) of the square itself

Faiths' squares were 3" finished size which yields a diagonal width of:

sqrt(2) = 1.414 * 3" = 4.242

Now you need to count the squares that are in one row (or column) and the number is 16.
Finally multiply this number by the diagonal width of the single square and you have your overall width of the square quilt which in Faiths' case = 16 x 4.242 = 67.88" so roughly 68"

To size this up to 80" I simply calculated on an excel spreadsheet  a few sizes up from 3" and ended up using a 4" square. It's inished size is 3.5" and by using the above formulae you end up with an overall width of 79.19" so pretty much where I wanted to be

And another image just because I can.....