Use our quilt border calculator to calculate yardage for quilt borders and how many strips you need to cut to make your borders.
This free online quilting calculator is a basic version of the powerful quilting calculator available in our quilting calculator app – Quilt Geek. Itโs designed to give you quick and easy fabric measurements, but for more advanced features and customization, check out our full app!
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How to use the quilt border calculator?
Wondering how much yardage you need to sew a quilt border? This quilt border calculator calculates the number of strips you need to cut for borders for your quilt. It uses the size of your quilt and the desired width of the borders to calculate the exact number of strips and fabric yardage needed.
The calculator will give you results for both mitered corners and non-mitered border corners.
Begin by entering the quilt top width and quilt top length. Use the illustration as a guide. The QW (quilt top width) is the horizontal dimension of the quilt top and the QL (quilt top length) is the vertical dimension of the quilt.
Enter the required finished border width. This is the width of the border without the seam allowances (the calculator will add a ยผโโ seam allowance to the calculations).
Enter the width of the fabric (WOF) you are using. This is the width of the fabric, measured from one selvage edge to the other. If you donโt enter any number, the calculator will use the default, which is 42โโ (as this is the most common WOF for quilting cotton).
Press CALCULATE to run the calculation.
Reading The Results Of The Quilt Border Calculator
The calculator provides the following results:
Width of strips to cut: the width of strips you need to cut from yardage to get the required finished border width.
Following are the results for two different options: non-mitered corners and mitered border corners. The illustration below illustrates the difference between the two:
Choose your prefered option and read the results for the chosen option.
Number of strips: this is the number of WOF strips you need to cut from yardage.
Total Yardage is the amount of fabric (with the specified WOF = width of fabric) you need to cut for your binding. The value is rounded up to the nearest 1/8 of a yard.
NOTE: This calculator assumes you will sew the WOF strips into the required length border strips end-to-end (and not with a diagonal seam).
Calculate Multiple Quilt Borders
Calculating multiple borders is very easy with Quilt Geek, the quilting calculator app. It lets you enter up to 5 borders and does all the math for all of them in seconds!
You can also use this free online calculator with some minor adjustments:
Begin by calculating the first border as explained above.
Then, to calculate the second border, run a new calculation and enter the following numbers:
Instead of Quilt Width, enter: your quilt width + 2 x first border width + 1โโ (for seam allowance)
Instead of Quilt Length, enter: your quilt length + 2 x first border width + 1โโ (for seam allowance)
The calculator will provide the results for your second quilt border.
You can calculate any number of additional quilt borders like this (always adding all previously added border widths to the calculation).