We all know what happens at the new year. Call them resolutions or goals or intentions, the boundary of crossing from one year into the next puts a drive in just about everyone I know to look at the coming year and where would they like to be at the end of it. I know, I know, we all want to win the lottery and be able to eat brownies every day and not gain an ounce, but aside from those dreams, what are my goals for this year going to be about?

Last year I set myself a goal to quilt 2 quilts on my long arm every month for a total of 24 quilts over the year. I am taking in customer work again but the goal was just to quilt 2 things regardless if they were mine or for a customer. At the end of the year, I came out with 30 things quilted, 12 of which were for other people. They came in clumps but that averaged out over the year nicely and exceeded the goal I had set for myself. I’m pretty chuffed, and I think one of the things that helped was that I set a goal so I kept working steadily through the year.

This year, I’m going to keep the same goal – 24 quilts over the year – hopefully with a slightly higher ratio of customer quilts, but I’m trying to keep the goal flexible. The main goal is to keep working, but this has me questioning a lot of other things in my quilting life.

I read an article this past year about how there is a drive in the US that if you have some kind of hobby or thing you do, you need to turn it into a side hustle. We seem to have gotten away from the idea of creativity for the sake of creativity – everything has to become a business. That article has been churning in the back of my mind ever since. I like to teach and design, but the weight of trying to turn all that into a business is a heavy load. Dealing with the public has an ugly side. People can be downright rude even over free stuff, some of the things I’ve seen happen to other designers this past year has been both sobering and eye opening. I don’t want to deal with any of that – talk about sucking the joy out of my creativity.

I have therefore decided that my other goal for 2021 is to decide what I actually want to make out of my business and just do it. Quit waffling over whether patterns can be free downloads or if everything has to be monetized. I even thought I could change the name of my pattern company to Caveat Emptor and tell people where to go if they don’t like my fonts or drawings or anything else about the patterns but maybe that’s a tad harsh.

At the end of the day, I will never get to where I am going if I don’t know where I want to go. Decisions have to be made. I’ll take this year to map out a plan, then go from there – it sure worked well for making progress with my long arm work. Maybe it will work in other areas too.