Crafty Calculations

Last Thursday when posting my progress report on the super major Xmas crochet project, I said I felt I'd fallen behind the pace needed to complete but also admitted I had no idea what the pace needed to be since I'd not done the calculations.  At the time I didn't even know how many days there were left until Christmas.

Well I have now done the calculations and created a chart to mark progress.  There are 95 days until Christmas.

Colors in blocks: 

pale yellow, mint green,
pale pink, pale blue, sage, 

golden yellow, coral pink,
aqua, lilac, peach, blue

Last week, along with a detailed description of the project, I posted the picture of the first of 9 strips of 11 squares and the beginnings of the 8ft Mobius strip side/bottom/shoulder strap.  Since then I've completed four squares on the 2nd strip and one square on the 6th strip and begun the first squares of four more strips.

Beginning those squares was part of the process of finalizing my selections of stitch patterns for the strips and testing them for gauge etc.  I still need to do that for two more strips.

But I now have a better sense of how much time I need to invest in this project daily in order to finish in time.  Keeping in mind that I should leave several days for sewing the strips into panels and the panels to the Mobius strip, blocking, tucking tails and sewing on buttons and other finishing touches, my sense that I was falling behind on the pace was not an illusion.

There are 95 days until Christmas.

The Mobius strip: Takes me 70-90 minutes to make the full 16 foot round trip (= 2 rows of 2ch mesh).  4 round trips created 1/2 inch in width.  I'm aiming for a minimum of 10 inches wide. and hope to make it closer to 12.  10 inches = 80 round trips = 80x80 minutes or 106 hours.  Add another 10.6 hours to each inch added in width.

YIKES.  This means I need to average more than 2 hours per day just on the Mobius starting now.

The panels:  The 9 strips consisting of 99 squares of which 21 are complete leaves 83 squares to go.  There is no way to calculate the time on these as some of the stitch patterns are very simple and go as fast as 30 minutes per square while others are more complex and may end up averaging up to 3 hours per square.

Keeping in mind the need to block, stitching strips into panels and panels onto the Mobius and other finishing touches I should have the strips completed at least a week before Xmas.  That leaves me 87 days for these 83 squares.

So my guess that I needed to average one square per day was pretty spot on.

To be clear that is one square per day in addition to 2 hours on the Mobius!

What about all those other fiber art WIP? :(

I guess I did not comprehend the magnitude of this project as I was designing it.  This is on a par with the work required for a large afghan in terms of number of stitches but has way more complexity.

Watch for weekly progress reports.  I'll also be including mention of this project in the ROW80 check-ins when they start up again for round 4 in October.