Every day, I stitch an icon that represents my day. Well today, I decided that I wanted to turn all of my icons into a pie chart that displayed the frequency of each type of icon that I embroider – whether that be business related, travelling, or even books or film related.
If you’d like to learn more about how to create an embroidery journal, I have plenty of resources available in my Etsy.
What do I need?
If you’ve tracked what each of your icons represents, it will make this process super easy, if not, you’ll need to have your embroidery journal by your side for this.
Next, we’ll be using Google Sheets. I don’t have Excel or any other spreadsheet software, so I’m unable to confirm whether or not this process is the same across the board. If you don’t already have a Google account, make one and open a new spreadsheet.
Let’s Get Started
1, In your spreadsheet, type out the following in the first three columns: Date, Icon, and Category.
2. Next, we’ll be locking the first row in place. You’ll do this by right clicking on row 1. Scroll until you see “view more row actions”. Click on “freeze up to row 1”. Now, when you scroll throughout this spreadsheet, it will lock the header in place.
3. Next, type in your starting date, for me that would be January 1st so I typed in “Jan 1”. Click on that cell and where you see the blue dot in the bottom right hand corner, click and drag that box down and it will autofill the dates. I’ll be updating this month by month, so I just started by autofilling through the end of February.
4. Next go through and fill in what icon you stitched for each day. I kept it quite simple, but it’s helpful to know each icon represents for the next step.
5. From there, you’ll fill in the category of each icon. Now this is why it’s helpful to have a rough idea of what each icon represented. A lot of these icons have to do with reading, movies, or TV shows and it helps to be able to categorize them correctly.
Help with Categories
- So we’re in February and I have only created nine different categories. Mine so far are: reading, treated myself, movies, TV shows, travel, my business, food, housework, and moods.
- Some categories that you might find helpful are: work, childcare, baking, cooking, needlework, crafting, pets, holidays, journaling, dating, gardening, chores, shopping, exercise, etc.
- These categories are really up to you to pick and decide on, it more depends on the types of things that you fill your embroidery journal with. If you find that some categories just aren’t working for you later on in the year, you can also change them later on. Like I have the category of “moods” and I’m not 100% sure that I’ll keep that in the long run.
6. We’re really getting there! Next click on the box where the rows and columns meet, it will highlight all of your cells. Click on “insert” then click on “Pivot table”. If you’re scared of pivot tables, I promise they’re really not that bad. I barely know what I’m doing when it comes to spreadsheets, but I can do this!
7. Select “new sheet”, you don’t want to keep it in the same sheet. Then click “create”.
8. Next just fill in the table on the right hand side as I have. That being with Rows displaying the category by descending order. Then under Values, select category and under summarize by, change it to COUNTA by default. This will note the frequency of each category of icon. If you have an additional blank row with a total of zero, this may mean that you had additional dates without any filled in information.
9. From here, you can rename the categories of your chart. I changed the name of COUNTA of Category to Frequency.
10. Now we are so close to being finished! Highlight the cells that compose your chart (excluding grand total) and click on Insert. Then click on Chart.
11. In that same spreadsheet, it will generate a table for you. Drag it over to the left and from there you can play around with the settings to get it just as you like. You can give it a title, change the colour of each segment, change the way your key displays, and so much more.
Best of luck with this side project to your embroidery journal!
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