Stats and progress…

First let me say, a home computer failing can really put a glitch in daily photo posting to a blog and I was much better at keeping up on my blog when the possibility of the photo a day was still looming…now that I have admitted I will never pull that off, I easily let the blogging slip too.

Today’s topic is quilting and my fabric obsession…I have too much fabric in my stash…I love too many different fabrics…I can’t possibly sew all the quilts that I plan for…but still I try.

On one of my e-quilting groups we freely use the term STABLE (that is Stash Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy). I truly hope that I am not there yet, but in the interest of making sure I can say that next year, it is time to start watching that stash shrink instead of grow.

I found this little chart on a group of quilters’ blogs and decided to throw it out here – these are her numbers not mine:

Fabric usage goal --100 yards-- 115.47 to go (going the wrong direction)

Fabric Added This Week - 11 yards (gift)

Fabric Added Year to Date - 58.75 yards

Fabric Used This Week -6.99 yards (or -4.01 cumulative)

Fabric Used Year to Date - 32.08 yards

Fabric Used this month - (11.77) yards

Net year to date: (15.47) yards (increase)

Notice that the originator of the charts does not indicate a ‘yardage on hand’ , that is because a real quilter has no idea how much fabric they have…and measuring it would mean finding all the places in your home where pieces of fabric have been stashed, unfolding, measuring, refolding,…you probably should organize while you are at it…too many sewing hours lost-lol.

In my normal OCD mode, I have to wonder about how the 'used' measuring is done. If you use a 2 yard cut then 2 yards disappears…but scraps are generated so do they reduce the amount used….and if you use scraps then how do you accurately take that measurement…what about those UFOs (unfinished object) do you take credit for them?

LOL- Nothing like good analysis on a ‘supposed to be helpful’ tool to paralyze one and render the tool useless…If I use a 2 yard piece and have less that ¼ yard left the whole 2 yards will disappear. Otherwise subtract the yardage left. Scrappy quilts will be ‘high level’ (read not obsessively) calculated to account for scraps used. UFOs will be stash until they are done and then calculated as yardage in project.

I’ll be going from the first of May so will make my goal 8/12 of the 100 yards (66 2/3) for the year out of my stash…that allows me to take the superhero quilt I just finished for J and the pillowcases I made for myself and S out of the totals – all finished a week ago.

I purchased yardage for the back of J’s quilt so that is the ‘added’ this week. Honestly it is the super wide (108”) so it really should count for more than just 2 1/2 but in the interest of staying in the spirit of the challenge and not OCD-ish...

Here is my chart – as of May2:

Fabric usage goal – 66.66

Fabric Added This Week – 2.5 yards (back for a quilt)

Fabric Added May 2009 to Date – 2.5 yards

Fabric Used This Week – 10.5 yards
Fabric Used this month – 10.5 yards
Fabric Used May 2009 to Date – 10.5 yards

Net year to date: 10.5 yards

Below we have the recently completed top for Js bed and up top is the done-done (quilted and bound) project from the Hoffman Bali-Pop.