It hasn't been the best week for long stretches of stitching time, but I've managed to work in some sewing time each day this week.
- 15 minute days/week = 7/7 days
- 15 minute days/April = 9/9 days
- 15 minute days/2022 = 91/99 days
- Success rate = 91.92%
Even a few minutes each evening means progress and helps maintain some semblance of sanity with all the other stuff going on at the moment. My goal for stitching time this year was to find at least 15 minutes, 75% of the time. I'm doing much better than I expected. But it was April last year when my stitching time went south. Hopefully I can do better this year.
It's been a while since the subject of stash management has shown up on the blog. Best I can tell, the last stash report posted was way back in 2020. Turns out I'm really lousy at stash management, I love fabric way too much. Posting my excesses on the blog didn't really stop me from indulging in new yardage whenever the fancy struck. But I've been doing better at asking, "Do I really need and will I use a given yardage?" before pushing the buttons on the computer. So my metrics for 2022 don't look so shabby.
I've actually used more fabric than I've purchased for the first time in 7 years. The 12 yard purchase was some red, yellow and purple tone on tones to refresh that part of my stash, I don't have a lot of those colors. I do have a Connecting Threads fabric order that should show up this week, but it was purchased to be the backing for the Macaron Mystery quilt, so hopefully most of it will go back out before the end of the year.
What's been more motivating for me on the stash management front is to see how my fabric usage compares to past years.
Last year wasn't a good year for fabric usage. I'm doing better this year, fabric out is already more than half of what it was last year and less than 1/3 of the year has passed. I've tried over the years to use the data I collect in my Excel sheet to determine what drives fabric usage. Believe it or not stitching time doesn't correlate well with fabric usage. Even the number of quilts finished in a given year isn't a wonderful correlation.
If I was better at data analytics maybe I could figure out the multivariate factors that drive fabric usage. For now, I'll stop with the nerd statistics and ask you how did your stitchy week go?
| 1. Julie in GA 2. Gretchen 3. maggie f 4. Melissa G 5. karen | 6. Ivani 7. Frederique 8. Andre at Quilting and Learning 9. DawnyK Week 14 10. DawnyK | 11. DonnaleeQ 12. Jennifer in Indy 13. Quilting Gail |
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Congratulations on keeping up your stitching time and the stash management numbers! I always enjoy your charts and graphs.
ReplyDeletegreat job on stash management. I started out strong but feel I am slipping
ReplyDeleteI love your metrics. Very interesting that there is no obvious relationship to fabric usage.
ReplyDeleteI have never gotten into keeping track of how much is in or out of my stash - just to keep using it.
ReplyDelete91,92% is a great success rate so far. You have very interesting metrics.
ReplyDeleteGreat diagrams ;) You did well with your sewing time. Thank you for the link party, and the motivation!
ReplyDeleteHi Kate, you seem to be doing well on many fronts, from using more than purchasing and for quilting most days. Good luck with the rest of the month! These days I'm using up more scraps than anything, so although I use up some fabric, there is definitely more coming in than going out :-) I had a pretty good week - very long but with some free motion quilting. Yeah!
ReplyDeleteApril is going well so far. Good luck. Love your stats and I'm geeky enough to appreciate them. I haven't gone so far as to track yardage in and out. I tried once. I do appreciate your work.
ReplyDelete. My stash is always a surprise waiting to happen, not that I have been doing much stash building lately. I did purchase a french general embroidery panel the other week but that would be the sum total of stuff going into to my fabric stash this year, its more yarn lately and even weave linen. Glad you managed to fit in sewing time this week.
ReplyDeleteI always love to see your stats, and congrats on a good start to the year for both stitching time and stash usage. Hope that things stay such that you can keep getting in your time, even if it isn't a lot! Maybe your usage is correlated to the number of pieces in a quilt! There is a quilter in Illinois named Thelma (Thelma Cupcake I think) and she tracks the number of pieces in each quilt - it is pretty amazing to see the totals.
ReplyDelete