Looking toward 2025

Ahhh yes! It’s the yearly recap so I can go over what I’ve done for the past year and think about what’s ahead. I love this practice and can’t wait to do it every year. It took me a minute to get my head around it this year though.

Some favorite things from 2024

One of the things I love about these recaps is looking at the things I’ve made from the year. Sometimes I forget when it’s been more than six months what I made. I waver whether that’s a good or a bad thing but it is how my brain works so it is what it is, I guess. Looking back over things from the whole year allows me to stop and enjoy them again or maybe for the first time.

Crochet in 2024

This has been one of my lightest crochet years in recent memory and I can’t help but see how busy I was keeping up with the new dog as the reason. She needs a ton of exercise so crochet has been one of the things that I had to slack off on in order to tend her. She will soon be 18 months old though and I hear that’s the finish line for puppyhood! Yay!!

2024 Goal Recap

Here’s my list from Welcome 2024!:

• To create community for myself. I kicked off 2024 by hosting a thing I inventively named “The Workshop” on Zoom. We met in January, February, March, and April and then May hit. May is a brutal month when you have kids in school so between the painting workshop, the 100 Day Project and my nutso life in May, I stopped this project. It was more stress and anxiety than I expected. I found community in a variety of other ways so what I learned here is that this wasn’t it.
• Pressing myself on my abstract painting skills. I made 6 out of 10 weeks for the 100 paintings class. I had a ton of scheduling conflicts that got me out of the flow of this workshop. I was really struggling with the workload on top a lot of other things. I did a lot of classes and workshops this year when I looked back at it so clearly I had practice on my mind this year.
• End of day studio journaling. I love doing this! It was so helpful when I started looking back over my year to help me discover what I worked on and how much I worked on. This was a fantastic process to implement and I will be continuing it.
• Art Retreat Week 2024. This might be my favorite week of the year, discounting the week we drove through the Scottish Highlands. It’s so exciting to pick a few projects to focus on and make it into a bit of a celebration. Highly recommend!! 10/10 – would retreat for art again.
• 4 group shows in 2024. I got 75% on this project. I applied to three and got accepted to all three.
• Work on the 6000 circle project. I barely participated in this. I provided some supplies for the group to work with but other than that, I wasn’t able to make any of the sessions due to scheduling conflicts. Our group contributed a ton of circles however and there will be a group show of them in 2025 at our local venue.
• I’ll be hosting an hour during the 24-hour Artsy meetup Marathon on New Year’s Day! Did it! Thinking allllll the way back to New Year’s Day this was a fun way to kick off 2024!!

What else did I accomplish in 2024?

• I made 21 journals. As I was digging through my notes from last year, I had written down a goal of making 20 journals in 2024. I have exactly zero memory of making this goal but I somehow still managed to do it.

• I completed the 100 Day project. I set a goal of finishing the 100 pieces for my project. I didn’t finish in the 100 days but I did finish!
• I co-moderated a startup online art community. This sprang up out of some drama surrounding a previous community I was involved in. While talking about it, a handful of us decided to offer a free option. It was a lot of fun to hang out with some like-minded artists and provide content for our refugee community. I’m stepping down from this roll in 2025 though to make room for others to moderate and to make space for my own work. This was one of the spaces where I unexpectedly enjoyed community. I wasn’t planning on helping with this project but had fun with it when it sprang up. I’m really proud of the way these folks rallied.
• I made two monsters as kickstarter rewards for Small Wonders. My partner is a co-editor for Small Wonders and they do a fundraising kickstarter every year to help defray costs of publishing the magazine. I decided it would be fun to let folks design a monster and me make it. These were seriously fun to work with the two contributors to design and then make their monster.

• I took a ton of classes. There was the 100 Paintings class. I did almost all of the Sketchbook Revival classes with my friend, Michelle. I worked through a bunch of lessons in a book on watercolor. I took a short workshop on Political Collage. I made a lot of space for learning this year.
• I helped get a brand new Arts Committee started at my new church. My new pastor’s eyes lit up when he heard I was an artist and he more or less conscripted me to head up the Arts Committee about 3 seconds after we joined this summer. 😂 We’ve only done one project so far but it was very well received.
• I wrote over 30 new blog posts for this website. While I didn’t write as many posts this year as I did last year, 30 is still a HUGE number of brand new essays. I work hard on writing these. It’s not an afterthought to my art practice, it’s a integral part of it.

What I learned this year

I pushed hard the first half of 2024. I entered shows, I worked on projects that I had set for myself, and I more or less ran myself into the ground. By August when we headed out for our Scotland trip, I was so tired of all the stuff that I’d been doing that I basically couldn’t get started again when we returned.

What I noticed from my yearly review from last year and this year was that I had a lot of frustration with feeling like I’m not keeping up with my goals and near daily frustrations of feeling like I’m perpetually behind. I’d like to make an intentional choice this next year to let those frustrations go because what I know from doing these reviews is that I am getting things done even if it doesn’t feel like it day to day. I want to focus on day-to-day enjoyment of my practice and not worry so much about big picture.

I definitely didn’t give myself enough credit for the work I did do this year. So I think I’ll make myself a chart for my studio journal so I can fill it in monthly. If I do it throughout the year and I can see the work, maybe that will keep me from feeling so frustrated.  

My word for 2025: Gentle

This is an obvious attempt to soothe my daily frustrations with my practice. It’s a reminder that being gentle with myself and with the work will spill over into gentleness with others and the world. Anger pushed me far the past few years, I accomplished a lot but I can’t keep doing it. I don’t like myself when I’m angry all the time so I am practicing setting it down so I can be the stupid change I want to see in the stupid world. World, YOU ARE WELCOME.

My word for 2024 was “slow” and while I loved the reminder and it did call me back to what I needed to do, the year was a whirlwind anyway. Maybe these words are just always aspirational. I don’t know. But they do give me a place to focus during my days. May gentle bring some loveliness to my days in 2025.

Guidelines for 2025

I find myself swinging back and forth between setting zero goals and setting too many from year to year. The reason I set so many in 2024 was because I set none in 2023 and felt rudderless. I need a happier medium. And also more hours in the day, like everyone else. So these are maybe less goals and more guidelines for my year.

A few guidelines:

I want to be more intentional about enjoying my studio time and being present with it in the day to day. So there’s my word of the year but also remembering that there is enough time to get things done. My word slow taught me (and continues to teach me) that there is enough time to do the things I want to do along with the things I need to do.

I’m going to make an intentional choice to be much more picky with my “yeses.” I’m a people pleaser so I often say yes when I should say no. I need to be much more intentional with what I take on this next year. I had some amazing experiences this past year and I’m not sorry about them but there were a few things that I said yes to that ended up taking a lot more time than I’d expected. So this next year if I say no to your ask, understand I’m desperately trying to protect my studio time.

Instead of trying to build new community, I’m going to be looking for where I already have community happening and lean into it: crafty days with local friends, online meetups with old art journaling buddies, and finding the artsy-craftsy crew at my new church. The hard but good lesson I learned this past year is that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, there’s plenty of wheels out here for me to hop on and enjoy that are already spinning.

A few concrete goals:

• Art Retreat Week 2025. This is honestly one of the highlights of my year so I’ll definitely be doing it again. After May gets done with it’s craziness, I look at my calendar for June and July and start thinking of what week it will be.
• Reread “Your art will save your life” by Beth Pickens. This book was written after the 2016 election and I read it early last year. It was a super powerful read and I feel like rereading it in this moment will be invaluable. I also love her other book “Make your art no matter what” and may just end up rereading them both this year. Food for the journey, so to speak.
• Make 30 books. I made 21 sorta by accent this past year. 30 doesn’t seem too unobtainable. I’ve had good luck working from the projects in Alysa Golden’s “Making Handmade books” so I’ll probably just keep tracking through that list.
• Work on building my collage library. I want to photograph/scan a bunch of my old art work so I can print it and reuse it in new work. This goes for making up some crochet motifs that I can have on hand to pull from as well. It was something I noted in my worksheets to do in 2024 and then I guess I just didn’t write it down? Anyway, I’m going to try to do a bit of this in 2025.

Have you set up your goals for 2025 or are you freewheeling it? I’d love to hear! Catch up with me on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post to be immortalized for all of time.

---

If you liked this post and don’t want to miss any news from me, sign up for my PencilBooth newsletter. I do all my writing here on the blog so the newsletter will be mostly links to posts and things I find interesting. But you’ll definitely get a pic of my dogs because who doesn’t love dogs?! Sign Up here.