Somewhere last summer, before we were engaged, but when we knew for certain we would be,* I got it in to my head that I would prepare myself for married life by making some quilts for our marriage bed. I let the idea percolate, and decided my first project would be a yo-yo coverlet because: 1) I think they’re beautiful, 2) they can be made with bits and scraps of fabric, without a coherent color plan, 3) no machine necessary, 4) no quilting necessary! I made a whole bunch of yo-yos, bought some fabric at a Mennonite store in Iowa, and admired my great-grandmother’s coverlet, but in the end my perfectionism left me with one single, solitary, hexagon:

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I’ve been cogitating on various aspects of my someday-to-be-married life of late, and expending a great deal of energy on (top secret!) projects for other, dearly beloved, friends; the emotional energy of which things makes me want to cocoon myself away and work on a project for myself– a quilt. Or maybe two, as I’d also planned to do a more traditional patchwork piece for the winters. (Oh, and I went to Britex and fell in love with a million different calicos.)

Enter google. Searching “quilt size” (it is wise to know about how much fabric one will need for a given project), I learned that a standard comforter (minimal overhang) for a queen-size bed is 86”x 93”… if you don’t have a calculator to play along with this game, that gives us 7,998  square inches to cover.

How many hexagons does that mean? My hexagon can be divided into six triangles. The height of each triangle is 2.75”:

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and the width of the base is about 3.25”:

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1/2 of the base times the height of the triangle gives us 4.47 square inches per triangle… multiplying this by six triangles per hexagon shows that my hexagon covers 26.82 of those 7,998 square inches… in other words, I need 298 hexagons to cover a queen-sized bed.

If I wanted a standard coverlet with overhang, it would be 102”x112”, or 11,424 square inches and 426 hexagons.

theknot.com informs me that I have 375 days left. This is going to be fun… (but now that I’ve blogged it, there’s no turning back now…)

*In all honesty, that happened in about February, really.