Creative Goals 2026 (Formerly Fiber Goals)

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

For the past 10 years, rather than doing new year’s resolutions I’ve been doing “fiber goals.” (First 9 years in summary, last year’s wrap up was posted yesterday). The idea has always been to set goals around chasing joy, directing my creativity, and making space in my life for things I want to do rather than things I think I should do. But I don’t think that’s going to be as much about fiber this year! So I’m changing the name to “Creative Goals” and opening it up to other types of creativity explicitly in 2026.

1. Set up my new creative space

I’m moving (at the time this posts I’ll be en route to my new house!) and will have a whole new office to setup. My needs have changed a lot since I set up my old office around 12 years ago, and it’s going to take a lot of thinking and acquiring of furniture and tools, and probably a bunch of iterations before I settle on a final configuration. I’ve been slowly working my way through the book Structuring Life to Support Creativity by Sandra Tayler so I’ll probably be using some of the exercises there to help me along.

A few things already on my wishlist: I’d like a more dedicated space with better lighting for painting, journaling and photography, as well as better storage for the related tools. My dog would like a space for napping. It might be nice to have a reading/knitting chair for when I want peace and quiet. I’ll be working remotely some of the time so I may need to plan more carefully for privacy when on a call, too.

2. Crafting for my new climate

I’m moving to a much colder area, which leaves lots of room for knitting new accessories and clothes, and maybe some for sewing too. I expect to be making up some warmer mitts and hats and scarves and sweaters, but also possibly adjusting my stash and tools and pattern collections to support more heavyweight knitting.

3. Painting with Fountain Pen Ink

Towards the end of 2025 I got into watercolour painting, and I’d like to mess around more with applying those skills and tools to my fountain pen ink collection. I keep thinking about it and not actually sitting down and doing it, which makes it a perfect candidate for a yearly goal so that I make time!

4. Write for joy

Writing was my substitute goal part eat through last year, but I think i’d like to carry it over for 2026 even though I don’t usually do that. I’m going to tweak the goal just a teensy bit for this year and specify that I want to write for joy.

Writing has brought me a lot of joy in 2025 and especially with so many big changes coming for me in 2026 I want to re-affirm that writing for fun (and not just necessary work documentation type stuff) is still a priority to me. Mostly I think this will take the form of more fanfic and personal journal entries, but it could mean conference talks or blog posts or original fiction too. I’ve got a story I want to finish and more I’ve barely started, I want to try more writing prompts, and I think maybe in 2026 I’ll finally try participating in a story gift exchange? There’s a bunch of other ideas down in my brainstorming section that might be worth doing too. I don’t know, but as long as it’s fun it’s going to count. The big idea behind it all is that I need to make sure I have time and space for writing and keep up a regular writing habit even as my schedule changes.

Other brainstorming ideas

These are ideas that didn’t make the cut above, but I like to record them anyhow in case I feel like working on them even if they’re not a big focus of my year.

Writing: talk transcripts/associated blog posts. I have a lot of older talks that I never really made blog posts about.

Writing: more ao3 comments. I love getting comments but I sometimes forget to leave them on other people’s stuff because I read offline a lot! I really need a better system and practice for making sure I leave comments/kudos more often because my current system is not working out great.

Writing: Hone my craft. It’s been a long time since I went to writer’s workshops or anything and honestly I feel like it’d be weird to go into that sort of thing when I’m primarily writing fanfic, but it might be fun to pick up some books on writing or listen to some podcasts or something.

Fiber art: A use what you have goal. My overflowing bins are minis and sets, so maybe one of those?

Fiber art: Publish a pattern. I’ve got at least one that’s 80% ready and would just need photos and stuff.

Fiber art: mending. I always have some to do but maybe it would be good to focus on doing a bit every month?

Fiber art: find a local crafting group?

Painting: complete some kind of challenge, book, lessons?

Music: find a choir? re-join the band? something else?

Games: More silly Scratch games

Games: Learn a “real” engine? (which one?)

Games: Try making html games. are there frameworks for this?

Games: walking game! finally!