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Introducing Olive
There’s a new canine intern in the studio and her name is Olive.
If you’ve been around my newsletter or blog, you have probably seen Stanley, our beloved big dopey yellow lab. Tragically, we lost him in December to a rare complication of Lyme disease called Lyme nephritis. By the time we figured it out with the vet team, he was already in kidney failure. He had been vaccinated, but sadly, vaccines are amazing but not 100% effective and labradors are particularly succeptible to this horrible variation. We miss him like crazy.
I hinted about Olive in my last blog post. We had a really rough December here. Just after the holidays we also lost two very close family members and January was a blur of family meetings, crying, and travel. We decided that our house just really seemed sad and broken without a dog, so we started looking for Olive. My husband and I were secretly both looking at rescue sites without telling each other.
Olive came from Kentucky as a tiny puppy. The story we heard is that she was dumped at a month old with the 7 other puppies in her litter at an animal shelter by an old guy who said “You better take em or I’m gunna drown em”. Her paperwork says she’s a spaniel mix and she’ll be 3 months old in just a few days. She was just 3.5 lbs when she came to live with her foster family in MN. We found her through Safehands Rescue. I didn’t know anything about them before, but the social media algorithms saw me looking for puppy things and flooded my feed with little furry faces. She and two of her siblings lived for about 6 weeks with a sweet foster family. She’s not quite 12 lbs now (which is a big change from Stanley who was 104 lbs!) Puppies are a crazy amount of work so we are so grateful to her foster family who took such good care of her. Safehands Rescue was so easy to work with and I appreciate the care they take in making sure that their fosters find the right homes.
Olive is short for Olivine Pegmatite. Our dogs always have names with a story. Those are both minerals in honor of my father-in-law who passed away in January. He was a geology professor and loved dogs, so we know he would have loved her. Winter is challenging for all kinds of puppy socializing things so we are trying to think of creative errands to take her along. Yesterday she went to the post office and said hi to all the people in line. She’s already helping out in the studio by finding every tiny piece of paper on the floor to chomp. Expect more puppy art coming soon!
My 2026 Theme: Bring More Joy
As I started working on my art practice goals for 2026, I was thinking about choosing my theme for the year. I often have a short phrase that’s a goal for what I’d like to do more of in the upcoming year. Last year it was “Use what you have. Do it better.” That was great for me last year and I did think about it when I was making decisions about what to work on or change about what I was doing.
This year’s theme is a little different: Bring more joy.
We had a rotten end to 2025 with a lot of losses in our family. The landscape here in Minnesota right now is stressful and scary. And all I could think about is “How am I going to make art and run a business with all of this going on?” The answer was to find moments of joy.
There are a lot of hard things that we all have to find a way to get through, like processing grief and the loss of peace and safety in my community. One way I have found that helps me is to take a minute and find something that brings me joy every day. Sometimes that is really HARD.
Sunday, I sent a text to a dear friend who I haven’t talked to nearly enough in the last few years.
Monday, I stitched many stitches on a new class project with frogs, which I love.
Tuesday, I got to share the news about an art exhibition I was asked to co-curate. Such a fun experience.
Wednesday, I got some super-secret exciting news about something sure to bring a lot of joy.
Thursday, I responded to email subscribers who wrote me notes after reading my monthly newsletter. This is one of my favorite parts of sending it out is the conversations I get to have.
Today I also remembered that I bought a deck of “conversation starter” cards, like an ice breaker game with a series of questions. Coincidentally the theme I picked out for that card deck: JOY.
So I am going to try to answer one of those questions each week here on the blog. One of my other goals is to write more here and this I think will help me do that. So today’s questions is this:
What’s your favorite thing to ask other people about?
The obvious answer is their pets. I love to know all about your companion creatures. I have too many neighbors whose dogs I know without knowing the names of their associated people. Ha!
The less obvious answer is I love to know about the odd things people love. What’s the odd thing you collect? What are you passionate about? What’s your odd hobby? One of my things that I love is striped socks. I wear striped socks nearly every day; I hardly own any pairs that are a solid color. I have a few pairs with chickens and vegetables, but stripes are my thing in nearly any color or configuration. They are olive green with white stripes today.
So what do you love? Fess up in the comments!
An intro to my Etsy Shop
I made a new video as an intro to my Etsy shop a week or so ago. I never know what to put in these videos so I’ve come up with a “four fun facts” kind of script that I use. This one was fun to film. I used a gimbal style phone mount that helps stabilize a video so it smoothly moves from one place to another. My studio is tiny, so it’s actually kind of hard to get it all in. The alphabet letters you see in the video are embroidered felt. I made them as part of the illustrations for an alphabet book that I am working on which is entirely illustrated with embroidery. It’s been fun to have an entire alphabet and to figure out what else I can use them for.
A Handmade Business Recap: Looking back at 2025
I’ve spent part of this week wrapping up things from 2025 and looking back at the goals I set for the year. My theme for the year was a carry over from 2024: Use what you have. Do it better. I’d say overall, I did use what I have, but the year was really mixed as far as “do it better”.
Online & In Person Sales
It was a discouraging year for selling art. When I looked at the numbers, my non-Etsy income was almost exactly the same, within about $60. But my Etsy sales ended the year down 36%. And I am happy for that number because at some points throughout the year it was down 58% from 2024. I had a really good fall and so that brought those numbers up a little bit.
I track some of the items I sell to see trends year over year. In 2025, I decided to basically discontinue the scarves and other wearables that I had been making. I sold some of my remaining inventory at a couple of small shows this year, but I am not really making any new pieces. I added the animal glasses cases that I have been making to the chart this year because those have turned into a best seller. The cost of the materials on those has gone up because of tariffs, so I am unsure how long I will be able to keep them as a best seller. Nothing really surprised me here. I had about 6 in-person events I participated in; 2 were new, 4 I have done before.
One factor I can point to in the dip in Etsy sales was that I had a really hard time sourcing materials. Tariffs bumped the prices up on a lot of different things I use for my products. I also had a huge setback with Spoonflower printing. I wrote some blog posts about it, but a change in the color profile forced me to re-color my entire product line. This took a huge amount of time and so there were a couple of months when my inventory levels were really low. It’s hard to sell things when you have fewer things listed.
Classes
Classes continued to be the big success of the year for me. This year I taught 96 classes. Of that, 22 were in-person, 67 on Zoom, and 7 pre-recorded video classes. I had 6 classes that were cancelled. I love teaching.
I didn’t meet my goals for teaching more pre-recorded on-demand classes. I had intended to post 6 to my website and 6 to Skillshare and I only managed 4 and 3 respectively. They are all great classes, but I am hoping to get even more up in 2026. Time was a big factor in that goal fail. Recording and editing classes takes a lot of time and I had a couple of unexpected projects come up that took a lot of my time.
I had to migrate my website hosting AGAIN this year. I feel like I say that in every single year end wrap up. The issue this time was caused by AI bots scraping my site and stealing the content. They caused so much extra bandwidth traffic that my web host wanted to bump me up to another tier and charge me 4x what I had been paying previously. They wouldn’t work with me to get the garbage traffic blocked, so I just moved everything to another host. I will admit there were tears and a lot of swearing.
I honestly considered just shutting down my online classes completely. But one of my other themes for this year was a quote from director John Chu about “making art that is a radical act of optimism”. So I decided that I wasn’t going to let the AI bots smother me, so I’m just going to keep moving forward.
Pattern Releases
One of the things I learned in 2024 was that patterns were more in demand than kits for my designs. People *ask* for kits, but they actually buy patterns. I released 6 new patterns in 2025: cows, sea serpents, parakeets, dinosaurs in sweaters, frogs & toads and the Nutcracker Trio. They have all been pretty well received. The sheep continued to be the bestseller overall. I wrote about the great flop of 2025: The Nutcracker Trio. This was probably my biggest disappointment of the year. I had planned to do a couple of classes and another pattern release in the last quarter of the year, but instead I decided to put it all together into this one pattern, releasing it as both a class and a pdf pattern.
I’m not sure what the 2026 designs are going to be. I’m feeling a little like I’m second guessing myself so I am going to take some time to really think about what I want to design and maybe send out a survey in my newsletter to ask for some requests? (If you have any ideas, I would love to hear them!)
How I balance my business
I didn’t make a chart this year but the balance is much the same as I have talked about before. It generally breaks down into about 10% design work, 25% in-person sales, 25% online sales, 40% teaching. This year because online sales were so much lower, the teaching part of my income stream is a little higher. I didn’t have any grant projects this year. The requirements for grant funding have changed so much that there isn’t much that I am interested in applying for.
Budgets are tight for 2026 for a lot of my partner organizations that I work with so I anticipate that I may be teaching fewer classes in 2026 because there isn’t funding. Several organizations have asked for more in-person programs because their organizational goals have emphasis on community building for 2026. I can totally understand that.
Things I tried
I attended the h&h Americas conference in May for craft industry professionals. For me it ended up being a lot of fun, but not a very valuable business experience. A lot of the education offerings I attended were aimed at a much less experienced business owner. I am not planning to attend again in 2026. (Plus I got COVID and had to miss an entire day of another favorite annual event the following week.)
I took a few craft business classes but with one exception I didn’t really learn a lot that I could put into practice or that I wasn’t already doing. That continuing education is always one of my annual goals and I think I need to dig deeper to see if I can find some more in-depth experiences for 2026. I took 3 other art making classes at the beginning of the year (glass mosaics & bookbinding) and then didn’t get any more in after that. I love taking classes and I am hoping to find more more opportunities in 2026. Have you taken a class that you loved? Please tell me about it!
I showed pieces in 5 exhibitions and was rejected from one that I applied to.
I bought a new upgraded sewing machine. The jury is still out; we aren’t best friends yet. I re-learned to spin with a drop spindle that my dad made me. I finished my first skein of yarn that I made into a project.
I had a completely awful December in my personal life and I let go of some annual business tasks that I do. I didn’t get Happy New Year cards mailed out to all of my students & business contacts. I skipped a newsletter. I cancelled a couple of events. I stepped away from social media for several weeks. I think I missed some deadlines to apply for things. I needed to do it, but I know that I will have to do some extra work to make the algorithms find me again. I’ve only just barely started to plan for next year, but the last month has made me decide that one of my themes for 2026 is be kind to yourself.
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
Teaching online and in person classes in embroidery, handcrafts, technology, fabric design and artist business skills. Co-author of The Spoonflower Handbook.
Making books, paper art and fiber art geekery.
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