My 2018 sewing in graphs

Happy new year, folks! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas if you celebrate and a good break if you got to have one. My Christmas was lovely and betwixtmas was blissfully relaxed and lazy.

I had planned to do a bit of sewing to try to finish off some of my WIPs but I ate Christmas food and watched telly instead. We’d saved series 3 of Ultimate Beastmaster for Christmas, which I very much enjoyed but would have liked a little bit more Honeybadger (the male Australian host).

But anyway, I lured you in with talk of graphs. I enjoyed last year’s graph attack so much that I’m back with another one this year.

What I made

I made 27 garments this year, 24 for me and 3 for other people. They were all sewn as I didn’t do much knitting.

As seems to be usual for me they were mostly all tops and dresses but I did also sew quite a few skirts this year.

Knit vs Woven

It seems I am a straight down the middle girl on the knits vs wovens question as this is the second year in a row when there was only one garment in it.

It was a fairly even split between knit and woven for most garment types but knits took the lead on tops and wovens on dresses.

Printed v PDF

I’ve sewn a lot more printed patterns this year but I’m still a PDF girl at heart.

Indie v Big 4

I had intended to try a few more Big 4 1 patterns this year as I have a sizeable collection of them now from magazines and from shopping sprees when they’re on sale. Ooh, maybe I should pick out some of them and do Ella’s #sewsix with just Big Pattern patterns.

I also “self-drafted” a couple of patterns this year. Not that there was any real drafting involved in either of them. One is a knit pencil skirt pattern that I’ve used twice. The other was a dress made of rectangles of fabric shirred at the top. So nothing fancy.

Pattern companies

There was no romp away winner in the sewing pattern company category this year. The bars in the graph below shows how many garments I made from each pattern company and the line chart on it shows the number of different patterns from each company.

Remakes?

I’m surprised by how few patterns I resewed this year. The patterns I did sew again were:

• True Bias Lander pants
• True Bias Ogden cami
• Dixie DIY Ballet dress t-shirt hack
• Helen’s Closet Blackwood cardigan
• My self drafted knit pencil skirt
• The skirt from Simplicity 1418
• New Look 6217 top in a knit (this was a fail)

Looking at it in a list it doesn’t seem as bad. There’s nothing wrong with sewing new patterns I suppose. I was just a bit surprised by it.

Fabric choices

No surprises that viscose is still my most used fabric as it is my one true love fibre. The percentage of cotton I used has nearly doubled from it’s 15% last year and polyester dropped from 29%.

Stash

Fabric

This year I bought 25 pieces of fabric totalling 41.1 metres, which is less than half the amount of fabric I bought last year! (Last year was 107.4 metres)

Though, my output was lower and I’ve cut out 48.75 metres (38 fabrics) and most of those things have become garments. Last year I’d cut out just under 69 metres of fabric but a lot of those things were sat waiting to be made into garments, which probably shouldn’t count.

So the stash DECREASED by 7.65 metres. Wooot! It’s not quite the 1 in: 2 out ratio I’d hoped for but I’m still really happy to have actually decreased it for the first time.

I also tracked how much I spent on fabric this year and it was £368, which is a little over £30 a month. I’m pretty happy with that, it’s not excessive and I can’t see myself managing to get it much lower. It’s an average cost per metre of £8.95, from a mixture of some really cheap fabric and a couple of pricier bits.

It’s a bit of strange thing to say but I think I’d like to get my average slightly higher next year. I’d like to buy fewer, higher quality fabrics. Though as I mostly shop online it can be hard to know what fabric is better quality and what is just more expensive.

Patterns

I didn’t specifically track patterns but I went back over my Bits n Bobbins posts for the year and counted up the patterns I bought. I bought 31 patterns plus 2 pattern books containing 5 and 6 patterns respectively. So in total that’s 42 new patterns.

And I have sewn 5 of them…

That’s not a great conversion rate, so that’s probably something I should look at this year. If I’m not going to make the pattern straight away there’s no need to buy it straight away.

I think I’ll track pattern purchases and cost this year too because I can’t keep buying more and more patterns I never make.

The verdict

I had a tough year at work and my mental health has continued to suffer so I tried not to put any pressure on myself to sew if I wasn’t feeling it. We also did a fair bit of decorating and I prioritised other hobbies like running. So I didn’t feel like I’d actually done much sewing. But 27 finished garments is the same as in 2016 and only 5 less than in 2017 so it’s fairly average for me.

I’d like to be a little more productive this year and work my way through my stash a bit. I’m really pleased with myself for decreasing my stash last year and I’m hopeful I can continue that trend.

If you’ve got this far I hope I haven’t bored you to tears with my nerdy sewing stat nonsense. If you like the nerdy stuff, is there anything else you think I should track? Or that you’d be interested in reading more about?