Since my last progress report I have sewn my eight large diamonds together.  Using the time estimate of 2.25 minutes per seam that required nine hours of sewing.  I managed to achieve this over the course of three days.

I really like the double row of hunter green hexagons that is created when the diamonds come together.  They look so nice after the white basting stitches come out.

I thought that I was going to have to consider carefully whether or not to add more green hexagons to the outside in order to continue the double border.  It turned out to be a no brainer decision for me.  I immediately decided to add the additional green hexagons to flesh out the border on the outside.  You can see how the border is crying out for a second row of hexagons near the bottom of the photograph above.  How could I refuse?

I’ve already started to add the second border of hexagons, some of that work taking place in bed. I am actually more than halfway finished with the border.  I’m saving those details for my next post, however, which will cover more than a week of work based on the time it is taking me so far.

I am linking back to the Monday Morning Star Count on Life Under Quilts.

Since my last progress report I have added the hunter green borders to the last three and a half diamonds.  This brings my finished diamond count to eight.  This work required 21 hours of effort this week.

I had to tempt Lori off of my pile of diamonds with some kitty treats in order to arrange the diamonds on the king sized bed downstairs.  The king sized bed is actually two standard twins on one bed frame. That makes it shorter than a king sized bed by six inches.  This bed is in is our guest bedroom, but its primary function is as a staging area for my quilting work.  I don’t have a design wall yet.  This quilt is going to reside on a queen sized bed when it is finished.  I’ll be auditioning the work in process on that bed next week after the diamonds have been joined.  That will give me a better idea of how much “filling out” of the borders I will need to do. The king sized bed offers more surface area for staging than the queen, however, which is why I am showing the diamonds there now.

The white quilt on the bed is one that I made during my first act in fiber arts.  It was made in the Spring of 1975 in a crafts course I took at Kutztown University. I was completing my undergraduate degree in art education at the tie.  The quilt is nearly 38 years old now. I’ll be featuring that quilt in a future post as part of a series I am going to call “First Act Friday”. It will showcase the few quilts that I completed in the late seventies and early eighties before giving up quilting for over 25 years.  That’s a quarter of quilting inactivity.

When the hunter green borders butt up against each other, and the basting threads are finally removed, the green borders will create a strong design element which will set off the diamonds from each other.  Hunter green will feature prominently in the borders as well.  I just don’t know how yet.

I will admit that I have moved ahead significantly in the stitching together of the diamonds, but I will give no details or photographs of that work yet.  I am not counting that work toward this week, but will add it all up for next week and present the visual evidence in my next progress post.  I have no doubt that I will have all the diamonds joined within the week since I am already about halfway done.  Here is a visual reminder of how nice the hunter green looks without the basting threads.

I am linking back to the Monday Morning Star Count at Life Under Quilts.

This week I have added the hunter green border to three and a half of my large diamonds for a total of four and a half diamonds completed.  I show my four complete diamonds as proof.  I’m not faking it.  Really.

That leaves me with three and a half hunter green borders to complete. which I hope to accomplish this week.   I timed myself on the sewing of one hunter green border.  I go into detail about that in yesterday’s post, Timing My Hexagon Work.  It took me six hours to complete one hunter green border resulting in a sewing speed of 2.25 minutes per seam.  That’s two minutes and fifteen seconds per seam.  I’m slow but steady, and I suppose that makes it even more amazing how much I managed to complete this past week.  I figure that I spent twenty one hours piecing last week on those three and a half borders.

It is my goal to spend another twenty one hours piecing this week and finish the remaining three and a half borders.  Then I can begin assembly of the diamonds, which I expect to be the most fun part of this whole project.

I had a big scare this morning when I went to assemble all eight of my diamonds.  I could only find seven of them.  I looked all over and was beginning to think that I had made a mistake about how many I had made.  After tearing the house apart I found the eighth diamond crumbled in a pile under my computer desk.  It had fallen off my lap while I was blogging last night.  Whew!

I’d like to share my simple travel sewing kit I am using lately.  My kit varies depending on what I am doing.  It is very simple right now.  It is a Tupperware container with hunter green hexagons inside.  It also includes my scissors, some spare needles, my sterling silver thimble, and my piecing thread.

I’m linking up with Jessica at Life Under Quilts.

When I first started to quilt with hexagons I decided to time how long it takes for me to baste a hexagon. I baste a lot of hexagons to have on hand, and I sometimes don’t have a project in mind for them when I do the basting.  I discovered that it took me 1 minute and 20 seconds to baste a hexagon.  That included cutting papers, cutting fabric squares, basting the fabric to the paper squares and trimming away excess fabric to leave behind a quarter inch seam.  I came up with this figure by timing some batches of each of these processes and adding together the average figures.   I decided that I would round the time up to a minute and a half for purposes of estimation assuming that I was probably working a bit quicker than I might ordinarily do because I was timing myself.

Recently I decided to time my sewing of the one inch seams on the sides of the hexagons as I piece them together.  I had estimated that these seams would take me a minute and a half each. I based this estimate on some small units I had completed and timed earlier.  I hoped I might have gotten faster in the interim.

I used the timer on my iPhone to time the sewing of the hunter green hexagons around my large diamonds for my Diamond Quilt that is currently in process.

I started and stopped working at least ten times along the way over the course of two days to finish the border.

I was quite surprised to see that it took me a tiny bit over six hours to piece that border.  There are 56 hexagons in the border.  It takes a total of 160 seams to attach the 56 hexagons in the border.  That comes to a disappointing 2 minute and 15 seconds per seam.  I was quite surprised that I was as slow as that.  The seams themselves don’t appear to take that long, and they actually don’t.  What adds to the time estimate per seam is the time spent threading the needle at the start of a new thread, rethreading the needle when a thread manages to slip out of one’s hand or when the thread breaks from too much tension.  In addition to that time is spent reinforcing the points and running the thread up the side when adding a new hexagon to the border. The unnecessary time wasters are when one must untangle a knot in a thread, or when a thread breaks from too much tension resulting in too little thread to finish off a seam.  In that event, it is necessary to pull out an already sewn seam one stitch at a time until the thread is long enough to finish off properly.  Problems can be minimized by working with shorter threads and finishing them off when there is at least eight inches left.  It is false economy of time to try to work with too long a thread, or to try to use every inch of thread.

Having found that my seams take 2.25 minutes to sew and that my hexagons take 1.5 minutes to baste I was able to estimate that each hexagon represents a surprising 15 minutes of effort.  Therefore, every four hexagons represents an hour of labor.

I will admit to being surprised by all of this.  I know piecing hexagons is slow work, but I had no idea just how slow.  I always felt as if I were moving along at a nice clip when I was sitting on the couch sewing. Perhaps that is because it is so enjoyable an activity. The news that I am spending my life this way is not going to dissuade me from hand sewing.   It certainly does, however, give me a good idea of the value of my work in terms of the time invested.  If I ever give away a hand pieced quilt I will be able to say how long it took me to make.

Just for kicks I decided to time the removal of basting threads and papers from one of the largest green patterned borders on my large diamonds.  There are 48 hexagons in the patterned green border, and it took me 8 minutes and 44 seconds to remove the basting threads and papers from the border.

That comes to 11 seconds per hexagon to remove papers.  Considering that I had rounded up the basting of each hexagon by 10 seconds, this amount of time spent removing threads and papers makes up neatly for that rounding.

So far in my blog reading I haven’t seen anyone address the issue of supporting their quilting habit.  I realize that some people have rich husbands, or good salaries of their own, so they aren’t worried about supporting their habit.  I’m retired, and on a fixed income to boot.  My husband is semi retired.  He has a part time job that doesn’t bring in much, so I do worry a bit about the economics of this habit, especially as it grows in importance.

I am sure that some people manage to make money quilting.  This may happen as a result of monetizing a blog, publishing a book, creating patterns to sell, long arm quilting for others, or even designing fabric lines to be produced by the big manufacturing companies, like Moda.   I imagine that people may not so often make money by directly selling the quilts they make.  Quilts take so long to make even when one machine pieces and machine quilts. It must be almost impossible to get even minimum wage per hour for one’s labor doing machine work, much less so doing handwork as in English Paper Piecing.  I imagine that some people sell their work on Etsy at a low cost simply to recover the cost of materials, and get a pittance for their labor, so they can keep on quilting, especially if creating those quilts is fueling traffic to a monetized blog or leading to the publication of books.

I’m going to be ill mannered enough to talk about money now.  I’ve never really minded talking about money.  I find it interesting, and so I am going to reveal the economics of my first year back in the quilting game.

It is a bit early to do this because we are not done with the month of March yet, and I started quilting again last April.   I have decided, however, to put a moratorium on quilty spending for the month of March after I ran the numbers for April 2013 through February 2014.  Therefore, the figures I present here will represent a full calendar year of spending.

I was prompted to take a look at my quilt hobby finances after looking at my available spending money recently.  I wanted to buy a new Macbook to replace my five year old model. I figured it was about time, and I should have the money available for the purchase.  Not only didn’t have the money, I found myself uncharacteristically in the red.  I wondered why, since I often used to carry a balance of a thousand dollars in my disposable income account.  Then I remembered all of those orders for Craftsy classes, fabric, books, and miscellaneous expenses related to my quilting hobby.  I decided to examine credit card statements, determine what I had spent each month since taking up quilting again, and to categorize these expenditures to get an idea of the big picture.

I discovered that I had spent $1770.15 on quilting related expenses over the course of the year, which comes to an average of $147.51 a month assuming I manage to keep myself from buying a Craftsy class or a book this month.

I itemized expenses for each month, so I was able to go back and total up some major categories of spending.  I spent $169.91 on Craftsy classes.  I spent $137.60 on books.  I spent $728.73 on fabric.

I should have known I was going overboard with classes when Craftsy sent me a special email telling me that I am one of their best customers, and they are going to reward me for it.  In addition to purchasing the classes from Craftsy I had ordered about $300.00 of the fabric from Craftsy. ( And today I got an email from Craftsy notifying me a day ahead of time about classes going on sale tomorrow because I am so special.  Well, I’m not getting sucked in this month.)

Adding up the three categories of classes, books and fabrics comes to $1036.24, which leaves $733.91 of miscellaneous expenses such as my Modern Quilt Guild membership, tools, notions. thread, batting, sewing machine maintenance,  a magazine subscription, and a local workshop.

$147.51 a month isn’t really so bad for a hobby.  However, Quiltcon is coming up in February of 2015 in Austin, Texas.  I’ve reserved a room for about $1,000.00 and I imagine that registration, air fare, limo service to and from the airport, entertainment on site, and food will run me another $2000.00 or so  That is going to raise the average monthly spending considerably.  Even if Quiltcon occurs only in alternate years, and I average those costs over 24 months, the cost of attending Quiltcon comes to $125.00 per month over two years.  That nearly doubles my quilting expenses per month, and brings my quilting expenses to nearly 40% of my allowance, and that is assuming that I don’t participate in any other quilting events, which is unlikely.

Obviously no one, except the very rich, can spend whatever they want on a hobby.  In my case I am limited by my allowance, out of which I must purchase everything that benefits only me: clothing, books, electronics, entertainment, travel, hobby expenses, professional lessons for a board game I play, tournament expenses for the board game I play, even a meal out with a friend, and recurring expenses such as my monthly Netflix subscription. The guidelines are simple.  If I want something, and it doesn’t benefit the marriage, I pay for it myself.  If I want something, and my husband wants it too, we believe it benefits us both, and we can afford it, then we finance it using our joint account.  This makes life simple and avoids arguments.  It also makes me consider carefully how badly I want something, and what I am willing to sacrifice in order to have it.  There just might not be enough room in my allowance budget to support my board game and my quilting while leaving enough money to buy underwear now and then.

Quilting is a bit of a gray economic area when it comes to using my allowance because I do make useful things for the home.   When I first started to quilt again my husband seemed to be willing to let me buy fabric without spending my own money on it, but I don’t think he realized the implications.  I anticipated a problem because I knew I would want to create a stash, and I didn’t want to have to justify each purchase and defend a growing pile of unused fabric.  So I suggested that I purchase fabric with my allowance and get reimbursement for materials when quilts are finished.  So far I have been reimbursed $55.00 for the materials used in the creation of a couch runner I made last year.  I have completed a few other projects since then, and it is my own fault that I have not yet sought reimbursement for expenses associated with those projects.   I intend to estimate the cost of materials for them soon.  This is all well and good as long as I keep making items for the home, but I’ll soon run out of useful things to make for the house, and having any kind of stash at all will always put me behind economically.  When I’ve exhausted the items I can justify as necessary to make I’ll have to consider whether I am willing to sell the new items I make to strangers.  It’s one thing to take $55.00 from my husband for something I put 110 hours into making, and to know that I still own it.  It is quite another thing to take the same $55.00 from a stranger and have it disappear from my life forever. Although having blogged about the creation of the object may remove some of the sting associated with its loss.  The solution to my problem might be to gift items to family after seeking reimbursement for materials.  Then I would know that the items would not be out of my life entirely.

Maybe I will just have to get my husband to pay for Quiltcon, or convince him I need a bigger allowance.

Okay, enough about me and my quilting finances.  What do you spend on quilting, if you even know? How do you support your quilting habit?  Do you argue with your husband about it? Have you monetized your quilting life?

I’ll be numbering my progress posts for the Diamond Quilt from now on.  Where does one go after “Even More Diamond Quilt Progress”?  It’s time for numbers to take over.

Since last time I added a border of hunter green hexagons to one of my large diamonds.  While adding that border I was basting about six hexagons at a time and then adding them to the border.  After finishing that one border I decided to get the grunt work out of the way and baste enough hexagons to finish the hunter green borders on the remaining seven diamonds.  I got out my calculator and discovered that at 56 hexagons per border this would mean basting 392 hexagons.  At 1.5 minutes per hexagon that came to 9 hours and 48 minutes of cutting paper pieces, fabric squares, basting, and trimming.  This was broken up into sessions of an hour to two hours each over the course of a few days with no other quilting activity taking place.  I completed all 392 hunter green hexagons, and they now sit in their own bowl waiting to be added to the quilt.

I noticed as I was basting that when the needle came up from behind my work that it was sometimes hitting the nail of the thumb that was holding the fabric in place on the paper.  I didn’t notice until it had chipped away quite a bit on the nail.  I probably would not have seen this happen if I hadn’t been basting so many hexagons in succession without other activities in between.

I am continuing to link back to Jessica’s Monday Morning Star Count at Life Under Quilts.  She brought up the subject of how long it takes to piece one’s work.  She has estimated that it takes her about one minute to do a one inch seam when piecing.  I am not sure how long it takes me to do my seams, but my best estimate is about 1.5 minutes per seam based on timing some small units I completed in the past.  My timing may have improved since then.

My goal for this week is to add the hunter green borders to at least three of the remaining diamonds (168 hexagons).  I also want to time how long it takes to add those borders and see if I am doing any better than my estimated 1.5 minutes per seam with my one inch seams on my piecing.  I don’t intend to rush when I time myself.  Piecing hexagons is a peaceful activity.  I just want to know what kind of time I am investing.

For awhile I have been meaning to post about Zite, the news reader application for the iPad.  I spend at least thirty minutes every morning over coffee reading articles related to quilting using Zite.

Zite is like Flipboard only better.  Zite learns what you like and what you don’t like. Just rate articles with a thumbs up or a thumbs down to make your preferences known.  I don’t do that very often, but Zite still brings me new things to read that meet my interests.

I have a category set up in Zite called “Quilting”  This is the first category I read every day in Zite.  After reading my Quilting category I move on to my other interests: Apple News, iPad, Macworld, Retirement, Cats, and others.

Above you can see that all but one of the articles has been grayed out.  Zite does that to show that I had read the article.  This helps in scanning for new things to read.  The little dots at the bottom show how many pages of articles are in the category.  So you can see that I am on page four of 23 pages of quilting articles.

If you don’t care about the order in which your articles are presented you can just look at the “Your Top Stories” feed (pictured in the top screen capture).   This feed will have articles from all of your categories.  I rarely use the “top stories” feed because I like to focus on one topic at a time before moving on the the next.

In the process of reading my Quilt category I have added individual feeds for various bloggers.  You can see them on the right side in the screen capture above.   We see thomasknauersews.com, lifeunderquilts.blogspot.com, jaybirdquilts.com, themodernquiltguild.wordpress.com, and bitsandbobbins.com.   I sometimes check these feeds to see if there is anything new in any of them that didn’t make it into my generic Quilts feed.

I started reading quilt news in Zite last year before I ever started quilting again.  This got my mind moving and sparked my interest in the quilt world.  It was one day, perhaps in April of last year, that I was presented with an article about working with hexagons using the English Paper Piecing method.  I thought, “This is for me.”  I want something I can do any time, anywhere, without being tethered to a sewing machine.  I want something that will be therapeutic and soothing, not rushed and hurried.  So I went to google and found some tutorials and enough information to get started, and now I am blogging about it.  In this respect Zite literally changed my life by presenting me with an article it thought I would find interesting.

I love Zite. I am saddened to report, however, that Zite will soon no longer be with us.  The article “Zite is Flipping Out” in the uppermost screen shot says it all.  Above you can see in the lower right a picture of Flipboard cannibalizing Zite. It is true.

That image is annoying enough on a small scale, on a larger scale it is downright scary.

Zite has been bought by Flipboard.  Zite has been viewed as the primary rival to Flipboard, though it never achieved the mass usage of Flipboard. What it has is a loyal following of users because of its technology. It was bought by Flipboard for this very technology, which is its ability to add more of what you like and hide more of what you don’t.   In the article on the left of the screen capture above, Zite CEO is quoted as saying “Honestly, the sooner Zite goes away, the better.”  I don’t agree, but perhaps what he means is that a speedy transition eases the pain for those most intimately involved.

Zite will be with us for about six more months.  They say that they will be coming up with a way to import one’s data into Flipboard.  Therefore, I recommend trying Zite in the time that it has left.  If you are already a Flipboard user, be gladdened by the fact that Flipboard will soon be better than ever under the hood, which is where Zite has always performed its magic.

I like being a Zite user in much the same way as I like being an Apple user.  Zite may be the underdog in terms of usage, but it has always been the definite winner in terms of quality.  Zite has earned its place of honor on my iPad dock along with the other apps I use the most.

I’m really quite a bit weepy about the prospect of losing Zite.  You could go so far as to say I am verklempt.  I loved Zite’s simple format.  I loved what it delivered.  I loved even more that Zite quite literally changed my life.  How often can you say that about a software application?  I wouldn’t be a quilter and a blogger now if it weren’t for a random article delivered to me one day by my beloved Zite.

I highly recommend that you give Zite a try.

How do you get your daily dose of quilting inspiration?

Since last posting about my progress I have added two large diamonds.

Now might be a good time to show what these diamonds look like from the opposite side.  My method of hexagon basting is to baste 2.5 inch squares of fabric to one inch hexagon papers.  I stitch through the papers.  After basting I hand trim the excess fabric leaving behind seams a little smaller than a quarter inch.

My greens from the Fat Quarter Shop finally arrived.

I never meant for the light apple green (on the left) to be considered for inclusion in this quilt, but the grass green and the hunter green were in the running.  When I ordered these fabrics I was unable to put my hands on my Kona sample card, so I simply searched for “Kona green” on the Fat Quarter web site.

The grass green (in the center) is totally wrong.  The hunter green struck me initially as very dark, and it is very dark.  But the more I looked at it the more I liked it.  I know it is going to add a high level of contrast to this quilt.  I also know that the lattice work it creates is going to take over.  But I think this quilt needs some contrast.  The diamonds themselves, while attractive, are a bit ho hum in terms of contrast.

In order to feel comfortable with my decision about the inclusion of the hunter green I auditioned the fabric with my diamonds. There is something really rich about the contrast between the patterned green fabric and the hunter green.

Then I stitched up a sample to be sure.

I used the green thread I had been piecing with for the sample, but I knew I would have to purchase a spool specifically to piece the hunter green hexagons, and this closeup proves it.Lucky the cat approves of the project and likes to sleep on a diamond next to me while I work.