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My 2025 Goals and 2024 Recap

My 2025 Goals

If you read my 2024 recap, you can see that there are a lot of areas that I simply made no progress. There was much of the year where I just couldn’t keep the ball rolling and would stall out over and over. This pattern has kind of made me not really believe in myself. I don’t think that I can do the things on my list, I don’t believe I can do it in my heart. I know that I can – I know it in my brain. I can make plans and see the path to meet my goal. But I don’t really believe that I can do it. 

Because of that, I don’t want to make a list of goals. Instead, my goal is mostly just to keep things going. To prove to myself that I can do it. So I’m trying to take things one at a time. when i finish the one thing, I can move on to the next, and it can be anything. I’m going to try not to plan ahead too much. I’m going to try to be more present and less distracted by the other stuff on my list. Yeah, I want to write more, sew more, grow my audience, etc. But also, I want to have a blast finishing my quilts and making new ones. I hope more folks will join along and help with the rest of it.

My 2024 Recap

It’s now January 2025, and I wanted to come back to this list and see if I actually accomplished any of my goals. I felt like this year was a distracting one. I felt like I didn’t actually move the needle in accomplishing much of anything. While there’s a lot of thing I said I wanted to do and made ABSOLUTELY no progress toward, I was surprised that I had accomplished more on this list than I realized. So… Here’s a recap on what I did in 2024 and what my 2025 might look like. All of the black text is my goals from 2024 and the blue italics are my updates from now – from a year later.

My word of the year in 2024 was “distill”. I feel like my life has become cluttered and scattered – both literally and metaphorically. I hope that using DISTILL as my centering word will help remind me to focus on what really matters most to me in any given area. I don’t think i really lived into that word of the year until very recently when i started to make daily progress toward decluttering my home. Also, I started working again in January 2024 and had a hard time focusing on much of anything – work, family, friends, anything. 

Quilty Goals

 

  1. Release 4 patterns

    I have at least 3 planned, and with one of them targeting a February release date! My first anticipated patten release in over 18 months! I released one pattern in 2024 – the Front Door Quilt and I love it!

  2. Work with a publication

    I’ve got plans here, and hope to share more soon! I wrote an article for Make Modern Magazine Issue 59 all about how watercolor made me a better quilter!

  3. Send a monthly newsletter I don’t think I did this at all, I sent 2 “monthly” newsletters in 2024. 

  4. Reconfigure my blog and website

    Everything auto-renews by the end of the month, so I have a fire lit under me to re-work everything! I’ll also be moving my shop to Etsy. I did do this! I moved my website from Squarespace to WordPress to save money. I also moved my shop to Etsy to save money. In the past, I had not been doing much with either and wanted to leave some opportunity to grow, but also to keep my costs lower. 

  5. Finish my WIP it into shape project

    I’m making progress, and it goes in spurts. But I would really like to have it completely wiped out by the end of the year. That feels both huge and possible, as long as I don’t stop working on it. You can follow my progress here. This is the “master” page that gets updated links for each newly updated blog. I made some progress here, but the WIP list still feels long. I still need to finish up my Scrappy Campfire Quilt, my quilt bee quilt, a BOM from 2022!!, as well as decide what to do with some orphan blocks. I also have on my list to finish a crochet project and I have plans for some garments. 

Personal Goals

I have a lot of personal goals for this year as well. I won’t share all of them here, but here are a few of them that you may see me mention on my blog or social media.

  1. General decluttering my home. I’ve decided to try and focus on one area each month to deep clean, declutter, and organize. January is off to a good start. It was Clothes and Closets month! I put away a whole box of clothes that doesn’t fit well right now to be evaluated later. I have a few large bag of clothes to donate, and a massive bag of items that are not suitable for donation and need to be recycled. February’s focus is TBD. This is an area that I largely neglected between March and December. It is something that I’m starting to build as a habit. I’ve even been sharing on my Instagram stories as my daily 1%. I’m optimistic that I will be able to make more and more real progress by doing small things daily. 

    Included in this goal is some serious digital decluttering and reorganization. I still have a long way to go here, but I’ve been working on clearing out my email inbox and I’ve recently gotten my emails to a much more manageable state. I also want to spend some time getting my photos culled and organized. 

  2. Catch up on my family photo books. I’m 3 years behind – I do one book for each kid for each year. I should plan a retreat for myself and just tackle these! Absolutely no progress here, though this is still a goal.

  3. Improve my running mile time. My goal is to get to a 10 minute mile. I’m currently at around 11 minutes, fairly consistently. Last summer and fall, I started running again on a pretty consistent basis for the first time in over 10 years. Over Christmas and January, I’ve fallen off of that habit, and I can really feel in my body that I miss it. Absolutely no progress here either. I think I “went for a run” a handful of times in 2024. I do still aspire to become a runner again.  

  4. Read more. I used to be an avid reader, but lost the habit over the years. Last year, I think I finished 3 YA chapter books. There is a lot that I want to read, and I want to get the habit back. I don’t have a numerical goal, but finishing more than 3 books would be a record for me for the past 10 + years! I did not read much this year either. I did finish up a few books that I started before 2024 (Sand County Almanac and Soil and Sacrament) and I read a few kids books that were sequels to books I read as a kid. I so still aspire to read more this year. 

  5. Improve my writing. I want writing to feel easier for me, and come more naturally. Specifically, I want to be a better storyteller. At the end of last year, I started reading the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s about writing, making art, and knowing yourself. I’d like to really dive into that book sometime this year. I also hope to write more blogs. Although writing feels intimidating to me, I know that if I do it more, it will start to feel easier. I made essentially no progress here either, and it’s still a thing that I want to do. 

  6. Do more of the stuff that I love. Just more of it without goals. More sewing, more gardening, more hikes with my kids, more calligraphy. More drawing, more watercolor painting, more botanizing. More time with my friends and extended family. More richness and less stress.

I would love to hear some of your goals this year – quilty or not!

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