How much fabric to buy for a quilt, and how it’s worked out

See what to buy

1. Open the quilt and choose Cutting chart, or Cutting in the designer’s bar. The Cutting page opens at Yardage, under Fabric to buy.

2. Read each fabric’s row: the fabric, what it’s used for, and how much to buy, with the spare it includes. Above the list, Quilt top and binding is the whole amount. For Porch Stars at 62″ × 76″, that’s 6⅜ yd.

   

3. Set Width of fabric to what your fabric really measures once the selvages are off: from 40″ to 44″, in ½″ steps. Every amount changes at once, and Quarter Inch remembers the width for your next quilt.

4. Leave Add a strip to each on unless you buy exactly. It adds one strip of the fabric’s widest cut, at least 3″, for shrinking and straightening. If you wash fabric before you cut, turn on I pre-wash my fabric. where it shows, and the yardage allows for what washing takes off.

5. Under Binding and backing, see the backing, batting and binding. Change which fabric binds the quilt, or how the backing is seamed, from there.

How we worked it out

Choose How we worked this out to see the sum for any fabric. Every piece is cut from strips across the width of fabric, selvage to selvage. We add up the strips’ widths, add the spare, then turn inches into yards. ⅛ yd is 4½″, so the length is divided by 4½″ and rounded up to the next ⅛ yd, never down. Here is Porch Stars’s Dark (Navy):

The spare is the fabric’s widest strip. Light is cut only in narrow strips, so it gets the least the switch adds: 3″.

Leftovers aren’t counted on: each strip width is cut on its own. A strip that’s part used is shown in the cutting chart, so nothing is cut twice. If your account uses centimeters, every amount is in meters too, rounded up to the next 10 cm (Dark: 2.3 m).

To work a quilt out by hand, see how much fabric you need for a quilt.

Backing, batting and binding

• Backing: 70″ × 84″, 4″ bigger than the top on every side, which is what most longarm quilters ask for. For Porch Stars that’s 4¾ yd of 42″ fabric with one seam down the middle, or 2 yd of 108″ wide.
• Batting: 70″ × 84″, the backing’s size.
• Binding: 8 strips 2½″ of Dark, joined with diagonal seams: 318½″, the 276″ around the quilt and 12″ to finish the ends.

The backing calculator does the same sum for any size.

If it doesn’t look right

• More than you expected. Check Width of fabric: a narrower width means more strips. Then the spare: turn off Add a strip to each to see the exact amount.
• A fabric says “Not used in this quilt”. None of its patches is in the quilt, so there’s nothing to buy.
• The amount changed after you changed how units are cut. That’s right: some ways use more fabric. How units are cut.

Checked against the app on October 26, 2026