Use This Handy Tool to Calculate Your Quilt Border Sizes

Hey Everyone, Welcome to Tool Technique Thursday.  Today I want to share with you this great little calculator that my friend Ruth Blanchet of Arbee Designs created.

There are so many times when we get the inside section of a quilt made and we think “Boy, I sure would like to make this quilt this size but hate doing the math to figure out what size the borders need to be”.  Ruth’s little calculator makes it so simple and easy – all you have to do is plug in the finished size you want, the size it is now and it calculates the width of the borders for you.

Ruth’s cool border calculator.

Example using length of quilt calculate size of borders:

I want my finished quilt to be 60 inches in length.  At present the quilt is 49 inches in length.  I punch in 60 to the calculator and click the Finished size button which will then display 60 in the top box.  Then I punch in 49 to the calculator and click the Actual size button which includes the seam allowances.  This number will be displayed in the second box.  Once these numbers have been put into the calculator click the calculate button and the size you need to cut your borders will be displayed in the third box. The borders need to be cut 6.25 inches.

Width of borders needed to make vertical side of quilt 60 inches.

Example using width of quilt to calculate size of borders:

I want my finished quilt to be 48 inches in width.  At present the quilt is 37.5 inches in width.  I punch in 48 to the calculator and click the Finished size button which will then display 48 in the top box.  Then I punch in 37.5 to the calculator and click the Actual size button which includes the seam allowances.  This number will be displaced in the second box.  Once these numbers have been put into the calculator click the calculate button and the size you need to cut your borders will be displayed in the third box.  The borders need to be cut 4 inches.

Width of borders needed to make the width of the quilt 44 inches.

When putting in fractions to the calculator such as ¾″ use .75, ½″ use .5, ¼″ use .25, ⅛″ use .125 and so on.

Here is the link to Ruth’s calculator and with some more instructions on how it works.  Make sure to bookmark it in your favourites as I can guarantee you are going to want to use this cool little calculator often.

I hope that this little calculator is helpful to all of you when you need to re-calculate those border sizes on your quilts to make them larger or smaller.

Until next time, Happy Quilting!