The Snowball Effect Posted by: Angela Short on February 11, 2015 at 11:00PM

When I designed the Flowering Snowball & More template set, I added lines and quarter inch tick marks in such a way that seemed well-suited to the shape of the parts. Little did I know at the time, that I'd added enough lines to create over 175 different quilt blocks. Yeah, over 175... I still can't get over it.

Dan and I are working together on a way to show the 175 blocks (and possibly more), but it will take us awhile to get that rolled out. In the meantime I've put together this chart of the possible Part B's and Part C's.

Math is a four letter word...

Figuring out exactly how many options there are was a bit of a process. If you've ever put a quilt together on a design wall and realized you had a piece turned the wrong way, you can relate to me – at least a little. In all my excitement, I kept making mistakes and getting confused. I just had to slow down and figure it out more systematically.

I came to the conclusion that Part B has 25 options plus 6 more options if we count the flip of any asymmetrically pieced blocks, for a total of 31 options. Part C was easier to figure out. There are 7 options plus 1 more if we count the flip of the one asymmetric piecing combo, bringing Part C's possibilities up to 8. Multiply 25 by 7, and that's a whole 175 blocks! When we count the flips, it's 31 times 8, for a total of 248! There's even 14 more blocks which I'm keeping in my back pocket for a future blog post.

It seems like one of those infomercials we've all heard before, "but wait, there's more!" All that math was done with the assumption that you'll use the same Part B's and Part C's within a block. If you use 2, 3, or 4 different Part B's and/or C's together in a single quilt block, there's even more possible blocks. The number of possibilities keep growing. What we have here is a snowball effect!

I'm not even sure how to calculate the actual number of possible blocks; that math is beyond me and likely to give me a migraine. As I often say, "Math is a four letter word for a good reason!"