Fun with Hokie Math

I just checked the Mosaic Yarn Shop blog. The current “Hokie Healing” square count is 6,589. According to Gina Bonomo, blankets are going to continue to be made until all of the squares are gone.

Let’s do some math!

It takes 64 squares to make one blanket. 6,589 squares divided by 64 equals 102.95. We’ll round that up to 103.

The average knitter could probably crank out one simple square in two hours. (Notice I said ‘average’ – not those expertly speedy fingers all tweaked out on caffeine.) The average knitter could probably make a complex square in about four hours. Let’s say, for the sake of our fuzzy math lesson, that half of the squares are simple, half are complex. So… on average, it takes an average knitter 3 hours to make an average square.

6,589 squares multiplied by 3 hours each equals 19,767 hours.

Impressive as that is, we’re not done yet.

On Saturday, an average team of 8 stitchers took an average of 2.5 hours to assemble 64 squares into a blanket (this is based purely on my own anecdotal evidence). That’s 20 hours of womanpower. Then it takes an additional 6-ish hours, according to my Mom, to crochet the two rows around the perimeter of the blanket to finish it off. So we have another 26 hours to add to each blanket. Remember, we're talking average volunteer knitter. The pros are statistical outliers.

26 hours multiplied by 103 blankets equals 2,678 hours.

2,678 hours plus 19,767 equals 22,445 hours!

To put that in perspective…

If one woman were to attempt this feat by herself, working 24 hours a day, it would take 935.2 days to finish the task. That’s 2.6 years, or 31 months, of NON-STOP STITCHING!

If that one woman were a little saner and were to approach the task like a full-time job, 40 hours a week – it would take 561 weeks (no vacations), or almost ELEVEN YEARS!

Conclusion?

Holy smokes, there’s a whole lot of Hokie Healing going on!