Readers,
In all my 35+ years of sewing, until yesterday, there was one simple question I was never able to answer with any degree of accuracy: how long it took me to sew something.
A few years ago my hairdresser asked me how long it takes to sew…oh, I don’t remember–a shirt, a dress, a coat, maybe–and I replied, “How long does it take to fish?”
What I meant was, what do you count as fishing? Baiting your hook, casting your rod, and catching fish, for sure. What about time spent driving to your fishing haunts? Reading up about fishing techniques? Buying equipment? Talking about fishing with your fishing buddies?
And if you drive to one of your fishing haunts with your fishing buddies for a weekend of fishing, and you catch nothing–does that count as fishing?
Answering flippantly in the moment is characteristic of haircut conversations–mine, at least. But the truth was, I couldn’t answer this simple question because I honestly didn’t know!
You’d think, with my natural tendency to document my work, that I could give a pretty accurate time range for shirts–I’ve sewn enough of those–depending on whether short-sleeved or long, and whether in a solid or in a pattern calling for matching. But no.
Evidently, I assumed that this information was either unknowable or too difficult to collect. Also, I think I also assumed, as a home sewer rather than as a custom clothier or reality show competitor, that such information would be mildly interesting but not very useful. After all, I’m not running a business or hankering to break any speed records.
Nevertheless, my hairdresser’s question continued to badger me. As long as I had no idea how long a specific garment, or category of garment, took me to make, I couldn’t schedule projects knowing I could follow through. I could just start things and hope for the best. And, I well knew, hope is not a plan.
Hope is so not a plan.
As I amass more experience and skills getting things sewn, my ambitions to create more garments–both for myself and for Jack–are only growing. If I have any chance of realizing my many sewing dreams, I must get a lot smarter about strategizing. And strategizing is going to depend partly on measurables, like, oh, how long things take to do.
So, last August I started experimenting with scheduling and managing projects on a monthly basis. This has been an extremely worthwhile and absorbing enterprise that will get its own post, don’t you worry, after I finish out a year of data-collecting. In short, I can see how many days in a month I spent on my coat project, for example, and how many months elapsed between the starting and ending dates. I’m going to make another coat from this pattern this fall and have a good idea of how much time to budget.
It was only a week and a half ago, though, that it occurred to me to try counting actual hours and minutes spent on a project. On June 21 I started a dress project, and along with briefly recording what I got done each day I estimated the time. After a couple of days it was obvious that my estimates were about as accurate as doughnut eaters’ calorie counts: not very.
Then a week ago I noticed a feature I’d overlooked before on timeanddate.com: the stopwatch. Now I could leave the counting to someone else and just do my work.
I keep my laptop in the sewing room, and the stopwatch can be displayed full-screen so it’s visible without being distracting. The time is expressed not only in hours, minutes, and seconds but in tenths and hundredths of seconds, which fly by on the screen.
Not that I’m competing in an Olympic track meet, where hundredths (thousandths?) of a second can mean the difference between medaling or not, but I found that the flying numbers had an unexpected, immediate, and positive effect on me.
Those whizzing numbers meant that time was flying by, but also that I was legitimately counting minutes of getting-things-sewn time. I noticed that the numbers flying by on the screen were a gently persistent reminder to stay on task. If I went off task, say to check e-mail or take a break, I’d have to hit pause.
And pausing was fine; I paused when I needed to or wanted to. However, I noticed that I became a lot more aware of when I wanted to do something off the clock. Pausing became a conscious decision, which was good. And starting the clock again and getting right back to business was another conscious decision, which was very good.
That first day of my experiment, when I hit pause at noon for lunch, the stopwatch had recorded 1 hour, 18 minutes. One of the good things coming out of that morning’s little test was that I was satisfied with what I had accomplished. I didn’t work especially fast or slowly but at a steady pace. I stayed on task, which, of course, was good, but I also saw how long tasks take, for me, which was invaluable.
In the afternoon I reset the stopwatch to record my afternoon time separately. I was curious to know how my afternoon productivity would compare with the morning’s. I counted 2 hours, 31 minutes of time on the dress project. That came to 3 hours, 49 minutes of project time for the whole day. I probably forgot to take the stopwatch off pause right away after a break or two, but, nevertheless, in a single day I had just dramatically improved my productivity. I felt very encouraged.
And continued to feel encouraged in the coming days, which was even better, as I continued to use this simple tool. I could tell that I felt more engaged in my work while the stopwatch did its job both of reminding me to stay on task and crediting me for time spent.
Last night I finished this dress, which will get a separate post, with photos, soon. It turned out well, and I’m very happy with it. I just counted up the hours and minutes, both those estimated for the first three days and those counted on the stopwatch for the last nine.
This dress took me–wait for it–44 hours and 27 minutes over twelve days. I am just floored. For a pretty straightforward fit-and-flare dress, that seems like a lot of time! If I hadn’t timed myself I wonder what time I would have guessed.
Now, what added greatly to the time was doing a Hong Kong finish on the seam allowances, doing a lot of samples before making the belt, and sewing on the belt carriers. Really, most of my sewing projects are learning projects with a garment coming out at the end, if I’m lucky.
(And people wonder why I don’t sew for customers, which is another topic I will address sometime.)
So, how long does it take to sew a dress? My answer now is, it depends. This one took me about 44 1/2 hours, including several self-designed tutorials along the way and taking photos for a possible future post. Another dress from this pattern could take much less time, if I leverage the lessons I learned from this one.
How long does it take? Put another way, what is it costing me to do this thing (like a dress) over that thing (like a skirt, which will need a top), or this thing in a particular way (with a nice seam finish to extend the life of the garment and give more pleasure to its wearer) rather than another way?
How long something will take to make is partly a matter of skill and partly a matter of choices. Knowing how long it actually took me to make this particular dress has been eye-opening like nothing else I’ve tried in getting things sewn, and I’ve begun to think differently about where it makes sense to invest my time.
So differently, in fact, that I’ve even thought about hauling out my serger and learning, at last, how to finish seams with it. I know, I’ve had plenty of discouraging experiences with this machine, but the prospect of saving time in the long run has me hopeful again. If I do try out my serger, I’ll start up the stopwatch to see just how long it takes me to hit various serging milestones.
On day 2 of my little timekeeping experiment I noticed that I wasn’t waiting till the end of the day to fill out my project management chart. At the end of the morning I jotted down what I did, and recorded the stopwatch time, and did the same at the end of the afternoon, rather than waiting till the end of the day to record everything. This simple change gave me a different feeling–a future orientation, where I had choices about what I could build on and still accomplish in the coming hours.
A week ago I had no idea that a simple timekeeping experiment would yield such encouraging improvements and yet such sobering realities. Now I can’t imagine how I could possibly realize my sewing ambitions without being grounded in this essential question: How long does it take? Without knowing how long it took I don’t stand a chance of estimating, much less improving, how long it will take.