Name:_______________ Date:__________

Quilting and Algebra

Suppose, for some fantastical reason, you become an avid quilter. Perhaps the internet has crashed and the world is in chaos and the only way to make new blankets and clothes is to quilt them together from old scraps. Or suppose that youve had an awakening at the age of 35 and realize that thing your life truly lacks is the experience of being a girl scout and you start with your quilting badge. Whatever the reason, you are interested in piecing together little bits of cloth. Before you is an envelope filled with the scraps of material you need to start your new life as a quilter. There are a few quilting rules: (1) The FIRST TIP IN QUILTING is to always start with a square and then build the rectangles onto the square. Keep this in mind as you work through the following quilting activities. (2) Quilts must be rectangular (3) The problem is that there seem to be pieces missing

Activity 1: Go through all your cloth scraps and mark the area of each in the middle of the rectangle in black pen. This will help you get an inventory of what you have to work with

Activity 2: You want to build a small quilt to start with. Take the blue 3x3 quilting square. You want to make your whole quilt shades of blue. You want the whole area of your quilt to be 56 square inches, but youre missing a crucial piece of cloth. Construct the quilt as best you can and tell me the following: (a) What other two quilting blocks will you need to attach?

(b) You want to start searching for a blue cloth that will fill in the missing hole. What should the dimensions of the cloth that you are searching for be?

Activity 3: You want to focus on making a quilt of many colors now. So you start with the big red square. You want it to be red, green and blue. (a) What should the side lengths of your quilt be?

(b) You will need to use two pieces of the same color. Which color?

(c) What will the final area of your quilt be?

(d) There are two ways to find this final area. What are these two ways?

Activity 4: Youre little sister loves the color purple so you decide to make her a quilt entirely out of the purple pieces of cloth. The problem is that you seem to be missing a piece. (a) What is the area of the missing purple piece that you need to find?

(b) What would the area of the whole cloth be if you could find that missing piece?

(c) There were two ways to find this total area. What were the two ways?

Activity 5: You find a large, mysterious piece of cloth (perhaps in the ruins of the SJS attic? It is kind of a narly shade of orange) that is too large for your tape measure to calculate, but it is such a pleasing shade of orange that you just cant resist using it. Orange seems to go well with red and purple. (a) Write an expression for the width and an expression for the length of the quilt youre going to make.

(b) To fill in the whole quilt, youll need to use two rectangles of the same color. Which color?

(c) Write an expression for the area of this quilt using the two expressions from part (a).

(d) Write a different expression for the area of this quilt.

(e) Both the expressions you wrote above represent the area of this quilt, right? So what is the relationship of these expressions to each other?

Activity 6: You decide that the colors on the last cloth clash, so you separate out the squares and decide to try making a quilt with orange, green and blue. (a) Write an expression for the width and an expression for the length of the quilt youre going to make.

(b) Write the expression that would allow you to find the area of your new quilt using what you came up with in part (a).

(c) Write the other expression for area. Can you do it without looking at the squares, just by looking at the expression you have written above?

Activity 7: You find a mysterious quilt made by someone else living in the ruins of SJS. They also used a slightly rank, orange piece of cloth thats identical to the one you found. They combined it with a pink rectangle, a pea green rectangle and a muddy brown rectangle. The quilt is (x+10) by (x+8) inches. (a) Write an expression for the area of the quilt.

(b) Find the areas of the four individual cloth squares that made up the quilt.