Knitter turned Quilter: Measuring Hexipuffs

After you make a variety of hexagons (no matter if they are out of fabric or yarn), you start to wonder how many of these things that you will need. Blankets and quilts just don't spring to life after making a handful. They take hundreds of these things, but with the variables, it is hard to figure out what number to pick. Will making a blanket big enough to cover a queen sized bed take 300, 400, or 500 hexagons? Maybe more? What about a twin sized bed? Or maybe a decent sized lap blanket? After all, there are always bigger and smaller blankets to have and different  people like different sizes of blankets.

That is when I decided to turn to the quilting side of the internet. The clever quilters have been dealing with the age old debate of "how many do we need anyway?" for far longer than knitters. They deal with cutting out bits of fabric and putting them together all of the time. Of course, knitters to too, but there are far more square knitted blankets than there are hexagon shaped ones.

Since I am back at home now that my dog sitting days are over, I got a chance to measure my bed to see how big I would want it anyway. I am making a blanket and not a quilt so it doesn't have to be big enough to cover my bed and fold down over the sides. It just has to be big enough to cover the top of my queen sized mattress. That ends up being 60 inches wide and 80 inches long. A decent sized bed big enough for both me, my fiance, and my cat when she decides to sleep with us.

I found a spot on the internet called CD Designs that was made to help quilters figure out how many hexagons they would need for a quilt. After figuring out how they measured their hexagons, I broke out my handy measuring tape and one of my hexiflats to figure out how big I was making them anyway. Since they measure their hexagons by side, I did the same thing with my hexipuffs and it turns out that they are about one inch long on each side. That is probably why they are so adorable, because they are just big enough to fit into the palm of your hand. After entering in the numbers and hitting the button to let them crunch the numbers for me, it turns out that my goal hexiflat count will be a whopping 1,829 hexagons. They even calculated that I would need 52 half hexagons if I want to make the blanket completely square instead of wavy.

That is a massive amount of hexagons and I am very, very glad that I have a lot of leftover sock yarn along with a big bin of sock yarn that I can turn into socks and play with the leftovers with. I am also glad that I decided to make a complete leftover blanket instead of having a specific color scheme. This will definitely be a long term project.