Quilting Goals for 2023

As a natural follow-on to yesterday’s post about my “best of 2022,” I’m back today to join Quilting Jetgirl’s #2023planningparty and look ahead to the coming year!

I find year-long goals somewhat challenging — the time frame is almost too long, which makes it easy to push things off to “next month” until suddenly it is December. Ha! But I do continue to find a lot of value in thinking about broader goals and intentions for each year. (And I’ll continue to set more concrete goals on a quarterly basis.)

But first, let’s review the broader goals I set for myself in 2022, and how I did:

2022 Quilt business goals:

• Continue to expand my pattern offerings. Done! I released 3 patterns this year: Game Night, Ribbons, and Moon Lights.
• Continue occasional guild lectures and workshops. Done! I’m so thankful to have added teaching to my repertoire in 2020.
• Grow my email list. Done! I grew from ~1,400 subscribers at the end of 2021 to nearly 2,500 currently. (I’d love to have you join me too!)
• Thoughtfully manage my tech editing and ghostwriting workload. Done! After overcommitting myself in January and February leading up to QuiltCon, I set better boundaries on the number of edits I take on in any given week or month and became more discerning about the number of time-consuming ghostwriting projects I accept.

2022 Personal quilting/creative goals:

• Complete another 100 Day Project. Partial success. I completed 75 days of tiny art.
• Rehome some quilts. Done! I sold/donated a couple quilts via charity auctions, sold one, and — after it was shown at 3 shows — finally sent Unscripted to its new owner…aka my mom. 🙂
• Take a Procreate course or tutorial series. Not complete.
• Try new things. Partial success. I enjoyed the experimentation I did during my 100/75 day project, but had intended to do more.

All in all, 2022 was certainly a success. I didn’t complete as many personal projects, which I think reflects the general feeling of being “off” my creative game that permeated my making this year. But my small business had an excellent year and generated more income than any previous year. (I am working on my annual income breakdown post and should have that ready next week.)

2023 Quilt business goals:

Overall I’m quite satisfied with my small business at the moment and honestly have the same 4 broad goals for 2023 that I had for 2022:

• Continue to expand my pattern offerings. I’d like to release one pattern per quarter, so 4 total. Two will be rewrites/updates of previous patterns that aren’t currently available, and the other two will be new.
  • Double Decker Checker (working title). I haven’t shared this design but it is a foundation paper pieced block-based design that makes use of light/dark color value.
  • Diamond Stripe. This will be a revamp/update of one of the first patterns I wrote. It will work well with fat quarters and 2.5″ strips.
  • L Is For. I will be renaming this one as well as revamping/updating the original MQG Pattern of the Month I did way back in 2017. The rewrite will focus on using 2.5″ strips.
  • TBD new design.
• Continue to grow my email list. I appreciate having a way to stay in touch with my audience and customers outside social media, and on top of that I truly enjoy putting together my monthly newsletter — it’s got the typical announcements and promos, but I love including peeks into my process and links to other great things I’ve seen and read online, including a few NASA and space-related things at the end.
• Continue occasional guild lectures and workshops. I currently have 5 lectures and 8 workshops (3 at QuiltCon) on my schedule for 2023. I hope to add a few more lectures, but overall I’m very happy with what I already have booked!
• Thoughtfully manage my tech editing and ghostwriting workload. I definitely want to keep the boundaries that I set last year in place for this year. Editing requests fluctuate — I’ll go a few weeks with none, then suddenly get a half dozen within a few days — and proactively managing my workload and communicating my availability has been so beneficial.

2023 Personal quilting/creative goals:

• Host the Pantone Quilt Challenge with Elizabeth. More to come soon! We’re excited about this!
• Make my 2022 Quilts Unscripted quilt, and continue with the bee in 2023. I really enjoy my bee and the many varied prompts my fellow members come up with each month. I’d like to finish my 2022 bee quilt (featuring astronomy-inspired blocks) before my turn as queen bee comes up again.
• Join the MQG Board of Advisors. In November, I was elected to be the Region 2 representative to the Modern Quilt Guild’s board, and my 3-year term begins on January 1! I anticipate that board duties will take a few hours each month, and will scale back in another area accordingly. I am excited to be joining this part of the organization and look forward to learning where and how I can participate.
• Complete a 100 Day Project. I don’t know what my project will be or when I will start yet, but this is an annual thing for me. (A start date hasn’t been announced for the “official” project yet.)
• Finish 2-3 UFOs. I made a list of 12 unfinished objects a year ago and knew it was highly unlikely that I’d finish them all. But making the list was a beneficial exercise that helped me complete 3 of the 12. I intend to post an updated list of UFOs in my sewing room as a reminder of what I can continue to make progress on.

Onward to 2023!