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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.
A Nut Un-Cracked: What to do when a pattern flops
I’m going to start this post with a spoiler: I don’t actually know the answer to this one. But I wanted to tell you a story about my big pattern release of 2025.
In about August of 2025, I decided to design a big pattern for the holiday season. I design a lot of ornaments, but I thought it would be fun to do something a little more and a little bigger. I’ve always loved Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. I’ve listened to the music probably hundreds of times and I’ve seen a handful of performances of the ballet. So I decided to do a nutcracker. Nutcrackers are classic and fun. I made this one the size to go on a mantle piece or be part of table decor. It’s a little larger than an ornament. It’s all made from relatively easy to source materials: wool felt, thread, sequins, a popsicle stick. I even put together a sequin kit so you could just buy exactly what you need to make the pattern.
I wrote a little in this post about designing the nutcracker. I decided to make a dog version, because I love anything to do with dogs. Then I created a classic nutcracker face and a cat version that could be swapped out. The body pieces stayed the same and you could make any of the versions you liked; you can see them all in the photo above. So I called it the Nutcracker Trio Pattern.
One of the things I try to do a lot in my practice is to find ways to re-use work. For this project that meant I was going to release this pattern in three ways: as a Zoom class, as a pre-recorded video class and as a .pdf pattern. I could develop all of those at the same time, because so many parts overlapped. The print version of the pattern is about 24 pages long, all illustrated with step-by-step photos. It’s practically a book.
I made samples. I photographed. I teased “making of” and “coming soon” photos and videos on Instagram and Facebook. I took the samples with me to every in-person class and event I did in October and November.
I did a lot of research about best practices for holiday pattern releases. I took registrations for the Zoom class and online class starting in early fall so that people could get theirs finished by Thanksgiving if they were working along in class. I released the pdf pattern on Etsy on October 1.
Then… crickets.
To be fair, I taught the Zoom version of the class to a group of regular class participants. We have done some kind of a holiday ornament pattern together every year for about 4-5 years now so they were ready to sign up as soon as I had it ready. We had a lot of fun in class and everyone made gorgeous custom versions as gifts for all kinds of family members. We even had ones made to look like the family dogs. An absolute joy.
But I didn’t sell a single pattern. Or have a single class registration for the online version. None.
In October, I tried not to get discouraged. It was early. People weren’t thinking about holiday decor yet. I made some promo videos with some dry ice that were Halloween themed. I did a Swifty Showgirl version. I posted clips from videos and talked about the embroidery stitches. I wrote a blog post and wrote about it in my newsletter.
November and still nothing.
- I took some new photos and swapped them around in my Etsy listing.
- I added photos of nutcrackers made by students to my class page and got some great quotes.
- I added finished versions to my Captain Labradork shop thinking maybe people wanted to buy them and not make them. (None sold.)
- I brought finished ones to sell at in-person craft shows and made a QR code with links to the class and the pattern. (None sold.)
- I expanded the sequins kit I had for sale to include some of the other optional hardware like popsicle sticks to the kit.
- I made a new resources sheet that matched the pattern to 4 different pre-set Benzie Design felt color palettes that would work amazingly for this pattern, so you could buy essentially a kit of felt ready to go.
- I ran a sale for furloughed government employees.
- I ran an ad in a holiday gift guide for the Craft Industry Alliance.
- I did market research and poured over similar listings on Etsy looking for comparable patterns/cost/complexity. (Mine was right in line with those.)
- I made SO many samples to use in photos and promos.
Etsy ran a whole video campaign about “Nutcracker Core” being a huge holiday trend. I’ve sold on Etsy for 20 years and I sell patterns like this regularly, so I know I had everything set up right and early enough for the algorithm to find it.
But sadly, this pattern turned into the biggest flop of my entire design career so far.
I don’t know why it flopped and that’s probably the most frustrating thing about being a designer. People went crazy for these when I had them at in-person events. Everyone said “you should sell these in the gift shop at —” or “these are going to be so popular” or “I would totally take this class”. They asked me if there would be kits available. They liked the social media posts. All signs pointed to it being a popular pattern/class.
I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve talked to friends in the same sector/industry, other makers, students and teaching colleagues. I don’t know where it missed the mark, but a few ideas that floated to the top:
- Maybe it looked to hard or too complicated? It seemed like an advanced project and scared off beginners?
- Maybe it looked like it would take too much time? People were looking for quick and easy? (I did sell a lot of simpler patterns on Etsy in the same time frame, especially sheep.)
- Maybe the algorithms were just putting my content in a deep dark hole where no one was seeing it?
- Maybe I didn’t promote it enough? Or promoted it with the wrong message?
- Maybe the economy just held people back from buying? Maybe it was too expensive?
- Maybe it’s really terrible and I just can’t see it?
I haven’t decided yet if I am going to retire the pattern on Etsy and relaunch it next holiday season or leave it up and see what happens. Maybe it needs to have fresh eyes look at it. I need to think about it some more.
As I am wrapping up 2025 and looking at my spreadsheet of projects and goals for the year, I made a choice to invest a lot of time and resources into this design and it definitely didn’t work the way I had hoped. That part of my goals chart are not going to be filled in for sure and yet I feel like I still did everything “right”. And who wants to post a rosy “I’ve met all my goals for the year!” post (like I’ve been seeing all around) when you feel like you totally didn’t.
And that’s the reason I decided to write this post, because I KNOW that I am not the only one this has happened to. It’s easy to get discouraged when you put things out there and so I wanted to share this story because I know it helps to know you aren’t the only one.
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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