ABC Quilts is a volunteer organization that, "sends love and comfort wrapped in quilts to thousands of small children who are born HIV positive, who are abandoned and living in foster care, or who are born affected by alcohol or other drugs." Our team of 47 students has decided to make some ABC quilts, using squares of cotton muslin fabric. Each square will be decorated with fabric markers or appliqué designs. The squares will be joined as "window panes" by fabric strips running in both directions (framing each square). The quilt guidelines request the overall size to be from 36" x 36" (for newborns) up to 40" x 44" (for toddlers to age 6), with at least a 1-inch to 2-inch border around the outside edges of the finished quilt. All seams are 1/4-inch wide. Your task is to decide how many of these quilts we should make. How many squares should there be? What size should the squares be? What should the dimensions of the quilt be? How wide should the framing be? How wide should we make the borders? Do not forget about the seams. If cotton muslin is 45 inches wide, how many yards will we need? How many yards of 45-inch wide print material will be needed for framing, borders and the back? (We can use 1 print for all 3 purposes.) Organize your findings in such a way that parent volunteers will be able to follow your directions to purchase the materials and cut out the pieces with no error.
After a presentation by a representative of the ABC Quilt Project, our team decided to make quilts to be given to at-risk babies through this organization as a community service project. At first we were just going to get parent volunteers to purchase and prepare the fabric so that students could decorate the squares and then work with parents to piece the quilts together and tie them. Then I thought about the difference between community service and service learning and realized that this was a golden opportunity for some mathematical learning while carrying out this service project. Many of the students had worked earlier in the year in Family and Consumer Science class with the teacher to put a quilt together. Most of the students had the concept of piecing a quilt together, although there were some who believed it was okay to simply sew the squares onto a large piece of fabric to form the quilt. Once the task was complete, we sent copies of our solutions to the volunteer coordinator and she chose to go with 38" x 38" and a 42" x 42" sizes. She thought we could make two of each so both homerooms could participate. The students then calculated the amount of muslin and print material needed for these quilts - a quick job after having done this task. Squares were brought in and decorated with fabric markers. The coordinator is meeting with small groups of students during free time and after school to put the quilts together and then we will have a quilting bee to tie them. The students are very excited to be doing good work for babies and doing good math as well. This is a great measurement task, as the students have to visualize the yardage of the two fabrics (each 45" wide) and determine how much to buy. I did tell them that most fabric clerks will only sell fabric to the nearest 1/4 yard so they needed to convert their inches to yards and calculate to the nearest 1/4-yard. They knew from past experience that cotton fabric does shrink and many accounted for this factor. Most of my students used grid paper and did a lot of sketching and modeling to come to their answers. It took many a while to figure out that the window-pane cross pieces would be long pieces going one way, but not the other as they cannot overlap. They also slowly figured out that making two quilts would not necessarily mean buying twice as much fabric as there was generally space for cutting small pieces left from the first quilt. They also saw that when cutting the squares, you could only cut whole squares from a strip, even if there were a few inches of fabric left over. Piecing the squares would not work very well and was discouraged. We also had a conversation about the "straight of grain" of the fabric so that they saw that cross-wise pieces needed to be cut in one direction and length-wise pieces in the other. This would have a major impact on the yardage required. More than 2 hours We spent two 50-minute class periods on this and then the students did their final drafts on their own time over five days. Some chose to do more work on them after getting them handed back and did so over school vacation. Students used the information and skills learned in Family and Consumer Science to complete this task. It would have been ideal to do the task during that rotation, but it did not work out. There are several adolescent literature choices that feature quilting as a major theme. Early American Social Studies Units make a great thematic tie to this task as well. Art teachers might join you in working to design the individual squares with the students. I needed to talk to the students about the idea that all the pieces should be cut as closely together as possible and drawn that way on the grid paper, as some just drew the pieces haphazardly across the paper not trying to conserve the fabric at all. Students benefited from working in small groups, especially at the beginning of this task as they generated a lot more ideas and strategies than those working alone. Some students were not satisfied to stop with the design task and accept the class plan. Some actually made their own quilt that they had designed.
- Grid paper
- Calculators
- Picture books of quilts
Solutions will depend on the individual design. Print fabric measurements must include all framing and border pieces as well as the backing.
This child spent a lot of time and energy on this task, but still missed the mark. S/he really does not understand the difference between seams and framing pieces. The diagram on the last page shows a 36" square quilt with squares joined directly together. The "final draft" on the page before shows seven squares across with framing. One can only guess where the answers to the questions on page one came from, as there is no work to support them. Why would it require an extra yard of fabric if the "blanket shrunk"? This child is confused throughout.
These students did understand that there were to be 1/4" seams at every juncture and that there were to be printed fabric strips between squares. They did make diagrams of the quilt patterns, but not of the plan for cutting the pieces from the fabric. That is probably why their measurements are so far off. The reader is left without much of a clue how they arrived at needing five yards of muslin and 1 1/2 yards of print. The diagrams are not sufficiently labeled and are not particularly useful to the reader.
This student has some good reasoning evident. S/he has a good command of conversion of measurements. The third page seems to contradict his/her information on page one, as the measurements are not the same. The diagrams could be better - the scale is off and it is impossible to distinguish long strips from short ones. This student should have used grid paper to represent the uncut fabric and drawn in the pattern pieces to accurately determine the needed yardage.
This student did an excellent job of sharing his/her strategy with the reader. It is evident that the student had a deep understanding of the problem and was able to identify the appropriate mathematical concepts and information necessary for finding a solution. The reasoning is clearly stated with all the steps included and the reader is led to necessary diagrams for further explanation. The use of good math language enhances the reader's understanding, as does the careful use of diagrams, showing the quilt design and also the cutting guide for both fabrics. In the last paragraph, s/he does not tell us if s/he would buy an extra inch or so of fabric to account for the shrinkage or if there is an extra inch already present. I like how s/he eliminates the need to buy extra yardage by arranging the quilt top into smaller sections as seen in diagram #1. I see this as evidence of a deep understanding of the concept of quilting, as well as using mathematics to your advantage.
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