Monday, April 11, 2016

I is for inches and other excentricities

Australia is a metric country. We started the conversion in 1966 when we changed currency. The song was very catchy and most Australians over 55 can sing it.

I was in 2nd grade when Dollars and Cents came in. When I was in Gd 3 or 4 I remember starting to be taught weights and measures in the old imperial system. We didn't get up to having to convert ounces to pounds, or inches to feet when adding them together. Then it was phased out... we didn't have to learn it because metric was coming in. We did learn to add centimetres and convert to metres, and grams to kilograms but being metric that is much easier. I was so pleased. I was intrigued when researching this topic to realise the dates that these conversions happened

Wikipedia had the following information on the metrication of Australia 

So Australia has been metric for a long time, as has most of the rest of the world apart from the USA. As far as the quilting side of things goes all our fabric is sold in metric units. However, as a whole the Patchwork and Quilting industry is very US centric. The American market is very very influential and so most patchwork notions such as rulers, cutting mats, templates etc are marked in inches. Most patterns are written in imperial measurements. 

In Australian magazines (and usually blogs too) the measurements for fabric requirements will be given in metric but the cutting instructions will be in imperial. Its one of those crazy weird eccentricities of the quilting world.


  1. Such a small world! I wrote almost this same sort of post for today. Actually when I went through school in the 90s I was still taught inches and feet. Not officially but more along the lines of this is what was and this is what your parents will know but this is what we do now. My kids have no idea on inches at all. Though they may learn if they look enough at my quilting tools.

  2. That's interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm not into quilting so I had no idea that it was still dominated by imperial measurements. Thanks for stopping by my blog.

  3. At least metric measures for cutting are to our advantage. I hate it when the fat quarters are cut imperially!