Back to the pandemic memorial sewing

The last time I wrote about my coronavirus memorial quilt at the end of January, I had 23 bundles of 25 postage stamp-size little quilts, on the way to 2,662 pieces -- the number of deaths in Kentucky in 2020.  With a few days off to sew Valentine hearts, I've been making good progress and now have 53 bundles -- halfway there!!  (I decided it was less daunting, and simpler, to count bundles rather than pieces.  It seems way less difficult to make 106 bundles than to make 2,662 bits.)

Meanwhile I decided that I needed a new hand stitching project, so I'm doing a second 2,662 memorial, this one in french knots sewed onto a vintage roll of six-inch wide bandage muslin.  

This piece is going to be organized by month, showing how the pandemic started slow, plateaued for most of the year, and then hit the fan in the post-Thanksgiving surge.

You know how I feel about planning -- the less the better.  I like to work out problems while stitching, not before.  I really have no idea how much space it's going to take to make 754 french knots, so I'm just sewing away.  Pretty soon I'm going to have to start counting, at least to estimate how many inches of bandage to give to December.  Then I'll work backward and allocate the same space to each of the other months.  

I think what I'll do is take a photo and pop it into my Paint program, then mark off each knot that has been counted with a click of my paintbrush, ten knots per color.  Like this:

That's 110 knots counted, so I think I have about 500 made so far.  Looks like I can do 8 inches per month.  I actually have enough bandage on the roll for 12 inches per month, so I don't have to worry about running out of space.