terriko

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.

This year’s goals were as follows:

Revisit Old Goals

Try Something New

~~Something Stash Something~~ Write more

Game Design

I realized that my original plan to run a stash-focused social media event wasn’t something I wanted to do any more, so I swapped that one to be the more vague but intensely more fun “write more.”

Here’s the mid-year check-in:

Fiber Goals 2025 mid-year check-in

Revisit Old Goals

August: Used up some leftover gradients for a sock (goals: self-striping, top to toes). Started a cable sweater (goals: complicated cables, knit a sweater)

September/October: Fall Finish or Frog Along! This is my favourite social media event where we finish languishing projects or reclaim the parts and let them go.

I wanted to focus on finishing things that would allow me to start packing parts of my craft supplies (goal: lesser used crafts, Whittle down the WIPs), so I finished a last couple of spins on my big wooden spinning wheel then packed it up:

A handspun skein of yarn in mixed purples is being held in front of a hydrangea bush that is trending towards hot pink and brown flowers but still has some purple left.

And I finished the sampler scarf I’d had on my loom and failed to finish last year, then packed up the loom:

A sampler scarf showing different textures and weaving techniques, done in blue and grey yarns.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll be pulling the loom out and re-assembling it anytime soon after I get moved, given how I felt about that last project.

I also made up a little “Chillow Collar” knitted jewellery kit that had been in my stash a while (goal: kits in stash). I totally failed to do some quilting or finish the sand seal my kid had started before he got bored of the sewing. I did get a bunch of work in on my fall sweater before abandoning it for October MKALs, though!

November: Working on xmas presents. They did use some stash yarn I had earmarked for projects, so they fit a few old goals! (goals: gradients, kits in stash)

December: One of my old goals was “toys” so I’m counting the gnome for that! plus I am still working on a sweater which was also an old goal.

Overall, this was a fun goal to recognize 10 years, but it didn’t turn out to be as fun as I hoped. Still a success but I think I’d have been better off choosing a specific goal or two to revisit rather than wading through the whole pile of them every month to find something to do.

Try Something New

I was feeling a bit burned out on coming up with ideas for this goal so I mentally de-prioritized it, but without trying to plan for it I wound up doing some fun new things anyhow:

August: I tried a little bit of bookbinding and then some soap-shaping with my kid. We didn’t work with lye or anything, he just melted soap blocks into fun shapes, and now we have a bunch of tiny soaps with polished rocks in them that he likes to dig out once they’re close to done.

September: This month was “fall finish or frog along” so I didn’t start anything particularly new.

October: Watercolour painting exercises from random books at the library. Some of them turned out really nice!

A watercolour painting of three mixed drinks with ice and garnishes.

I also did some hand lettering exercises, but didn’t get as far with that.

November: More watercolours. Also I had to learn an entire web development framework in a “language not on my resume” for a tech interview, which was fun but tiring.

A botanical watercolour painting featuring wild roses and berries. there is a paintbrush and a box with a palette holding the painting on the corners.

December: I’m also counting the gnome for this because it’s my first time knitting one in DK weight yarn, so I need to adjust the tools I use. And Imagined Landscapes often throws in a new technique or two to play with so who knows maybe i’ll learn something.

So even though I’d been planning to mostly drop this goal, I did some fun new things and didn’t stress about it and it was great. Absolutely finished this one out perfectly.

Write more

Kept chugging on fanfics, including writing for another event. I spent a lot of time in “writing sprints” where we kind of turn writing into something that’s a cross between a pomodoro timer and parallel play. I’ve had writing be a bit social back when I used to write for the Geek Feminism blog, but this is differently social and I love it. I’m starting to understand why every novel I read lately thanks their writing group.

For the blog, I’ve been keeping up with the monthly stationary posts. I’d hoped to spend some more time writing tech stuff in conjunction with my slow job hunt so my blog would look more nerdy again, but I haven’t gotten around to that as much. Turns out planning an international move eats up a lot of time, plus we had more than one medical emergency, and then I spent 3 weeks solo parenting while J flew to Canada to prep our new house. Oh, and I hit my head badly after the dog took off after a squirrel, and healing head injuries is rough and made worse by the fact that most of the signs you’re supposed to watch for are things that I experience regularly: headaches, dizziness, nausea.

The fanfic experience this year has been fantastic and the writing sprints have improved my life and honestly probably my mental health. If you combine the blog and fanfic I’ve published over 100k words this year and have written more that’s still in drafts or got edited out. So this goal has been a huge success!

Game Design

I got really into making silly games in Scratch with my kid and for my fandom friends in the fall, so this was a huge winner.

I still want to work in some less kid-oriented frameworks, but I’ve actually been really pleased with the amount of stuff they packed into Scratch. It’s been fun to look at the stupid mobile games and stuff my kid sees streamers play and think “Hey, we could make that in Scratch” so I think we’ll have some more fun prototyping silly ideas about how to make games better.

Also, I love that kiddo and I have been having real conversations about game design and fun and difficulty curves and art assets and stuff. I may need to see about joining some game design oriented communities the way I’ve been enjoying fandom communities if I want to turn this from a casual sometimes thing to a regular activity in my life, but for now kid and I are having a good time together. So I declare this goal a success!

Conclusions

Honestly, I think these weren’t the best goals: obviously the stash thing didn’t work out, and I think maybe revisiting old goals and doing “something new” were both a bit too open-ended and looking through that big list of previous years goals wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be. That’s probably because this was a year of burnout so I could have used more direction from my past self (but I was already very burned out last year when I was putting these goals together, so it is what it is). I got a lot out of the 2025 goals in the end, but it was a bit more of a struggle than fiber goals have been for me in previous years. Of course, everything has been a bit of a struggle this year so maybe the goals aren’t to blame.

For my personal goals tracking, I switched to re-writing the goals in my monthly journal spreads, then recording one or two things I planned to do to fill them, or added things after when I wrapped up the month. It made writing these wrap-up posts a lot easier! I think it helped me to have them where I was checking off completed projects so I saw them when I was deciding what to work on next, too. One of the things I enjoy about using a blank journal rather than one with preset pages is that I can slowly tweak these things as I find different things I need to record or keep in the front of my mind.

I still love the idea of fiber goals, but I think it’s fair to say that I’m stretching out from fiber right now and that’s unlikely to change in 2026. So I’m going to keep the idea of “have goals for things that bring you joy” going, but switch to calling them “Creative goals” for next year. Stay tuned tomorrow for what those goals will be!