2022 Year in Craft

A few years ago I spotted a course on Domestika called Data Visualization with Alternative Mediums, in which a designer was creating data visualisations with embroidery. This hit me hard; I watched the course and loved the idea of melding my two great loves - data and crafts - but at the time I couldn’t come up with an idea of what I could visualise.

Maybe a year later I was feeling a bit low. Pandemic blues, work woes, general malaise. But I’d come to the realisation that crafting makes me feel better; it’s just fun. Plus, even if everything else sucks and feels like it’s going backwards, a few stitches on a project is a positive move forwards. And at the time I was working on a huge yellow blanket (to spark ✨joy✨) and just being in the same space as those cheerful yellow squares made me feel good, let alone working on them.

So I resolved to do at least a little bit of crafting every single day. I set up a page in my bullet journal, with a little key telling me what project I was working on, and I started my mission.

Then a brilliant thought came to me. I could make a chart out of this. I could make a spreadsheet and chart my progress and calculate all sorts of fun stats about my crafting habits and make some fun visualisations.

Then a really brilliant thought came to me. I could visualise this with crafts.

Here was the inspiration I’d been waiting for.

I decided on a simple calendar-based log in cross-stitch. I could update it every day if I wanted, but with my bullet journal log it would be easy enough to go back and backfill if I had to. I’d be able to see any patterns over time - week, month, and season. I could segment it by craft; knitting/sewing/needlework/other to see where most of my time goes.

I raided my embroidery supplies and picked a few colours; a teal-y green for knitting; mustard yellow for sewing; shocking pink for needlework; and purple for anything else. I sketched out a grid on creased graph paper I found in a drawer with enough space for every day, and I started to lay out the grid.

And I laughed. I grinned. I cackled with every stitch. I didn’t know what the neighbours thought and I didn’t care because I was, for those few hours, a font of purest joy. I couldn’t stop laughing, because this was the absolute pinnacle of me. How much more me could I get than crafting a data visualisation about crafts?

As the year went on I continued to update both my log and the embroidery. I brought it up in job interviews to show how quirky and smart I am. I don’t know how effective it was but it certainly made the interviews more fun for me (which is important as job-hunting is pretty miserable otherwise.)

At the end of the year I pulled the numbers together in a csv and did some analysis in Python. What do you know, I spent more days knitting than doing any other crafts!

And unsurprisingly, the huge yellow blanket took up most of my days. It was the fallback project - if I did no other crafting that day I would make myself do at least a few stitches on that to prevent a cross in the day. The two jumpers took between 35-50 days each; and for sewing projects, the floral georgette dress covers a long time because I had to put it in the naughty corner to think about what it had done.

Finally, you can see the loose weekly trend in crafts from the stitched piece. I was most likely to miss a Wednesday or Thursday - partly because in September I got a job that involved commuting from Cardiff to London every Wednesday, which obviously left me shattered on a Thursday (on the stitched chart, it’s even clearer how those two days were affected if you look at October). And weekends are much more likely to be sewing days; I like to set up on a Friday, cutting my pattern pieces and fabric, then get into the sewing on Sat and Sun when I have a full day to focus.

So there we go.

This was such a fun project but I did immediately decide that I wasn’t going to do it again, at least not immediately. At some point, though I would like to do an enhanced version that does a bit more… science. Given that the starting point is ‘crafting makes me feel better’, I feel like there’s room for mood tracking alongside the crafts, to see if there’s any correlation. Although you might need to also track other major things that might impact mood or mental health - work, school, relationships etc.

One for future-me I think. :)