Once a nerd.....

OK, I just have to share this with someone! I am feeling ridiculously proud of myself. A little background - I have been following Karen Montgomery on the Nine Patch A Day group on Facebook. She occasionally designs a quilt and shares the pattern with the group. Back in July, 2022 she posted the directions for a Lottery Quilt. It is an easy, scrappy quilt made out of rectangles. The idea is that you use the daily lottery number to decide what color fabric to put where. Each number 0 - 9 is assigned to a color. For example, if number 3 is assigned to red, 7 assigned to blue and 9 assigned to purple, then the number 379 would be represented by a block with a red, a blue and a purple strip, in that order.

The actual directions use a 5 digit daily number, and either 1 1/2 x 5, 2 x 8 or 2 1/2 x 10 1/2 inch strips, depending on how big you want to finished quilt to be.

It looked like a great way to use up some scraps, so I decided to play along. I opened my scrap bin and cut a bunch of various colored 2 x 8 inch strips.

I made the first block on July 1st, made the second block on July 2nd, and so on for about the first week. Then I missed a day for one reason or another. 'No worries, I'll catch up', I thought ..... Well, months later and I am waaaay behind. Once I fell behind, it just felt too overwhelming to go back and find all the numbers, write them down, convert them to the correct color, figure out how many strips I needed, etc. So the lottery quilt languished on the back-burner. But I don't want another UFO, so I am determined to finish it.

Today, while I was trying to figure out a quick and easy way to organize the numbers and convert them to the correct colors, it hit me! I could make a spreadsheet! I used to use spreadsheets all the time when I was working, but I haven't had an occasion to use my skills since I retired. I wasn't sure that I'd remember how, but everything came back pretty quickly. I opened the lottery website and found the history page. This is a cool feature that lets you see the numbers for any given period of time. Since I had already made the blocks for the first couple of weeks of July, 2022, I decided to continue where I left off.

I copied the dates and corresponding numbers to the clipboard, opened Excel, and imported the numbers into a new spreadsheet using the 'convert text to columns wizard' to make sure that each number pasted into it's own column. Then I used conditional formatting to make each number into the appropriate color. TA-DA! Now all I have to do is is glance at the spreadsheet to know which color to sew where!

Yep, once a nerd, always a nerd!