Shift Happens

In the darkest period of the year, when the days are shortest and the nights stretch on into dark gloomy mornings, and the bright lights of the holidays are slowly dimmed, the turn of the new year invites us to meditate on Time.

We don’t get a lot if it. Even the luckiest of us are granted relatively little time, especially if you’re capable of using your time to take care of yourself and others. I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately, how I spend mine and where it goes. Lots of it goes into yarn, of course!

Recently I’ve been in the process of re-evaluating my schedule for my business endeavors. Since the summer this year a lot has moved and shifted around for me, and I’ve tried a couple new avenues for my art and suffered some losses as well. You can read more about video media, patronage, and art theft on these linked posts if you like!

To save Time, I won’t launch into my epic ramble about all the different ways that my life has changed since the onset of the pandemic two years ago and the affect that has had on my mental health and productivity. Suffice to say that for the New Year, I’m dropping a few things off of my digital roster and focusing more on the artwork itself. This post is just a little “housekeeping” summary of how I’m managing Morale Fiber these days.

Contacting Me with Questions

Over the years of building Morale Fiber I’ve been stringent about liking, answering, and replying to as many communications as I possibly can, whether they are in the form of a comment, tagged post, or direct message. As you might imagine, as I got more exposure this became a lot more work and I knew at some point, it was going to become too much labor to hold myself to the same standard as I did in the beginning! Reading all the comments and responses to my work is very rewarding, but I don’t always have time to respond anymore, and it’s getting to the point where I may not get around to reading every comment, at least not quickly – so if you have a question about a pattern or about a post that I’ve made, please send your questions in the form of Direct Messages. I can’t guarantee any questions left in the comments will be answered in a timely manner, whereas I DO check my inboxes regularly (whether FB, Instagram, Etsy, Ravelry, directly e-mailing me, etc) and can be depended upon to answer direct messages within 24-48 hours generally.

Please note that this especially applies to YOUTUBE! I have had enormous trouble sorting through comments and things on YouTube, I’m not sure why but their comments section is always a mess on my devices. As a result I will no longer be offering technical support through the comment section of my YouTube channel – please e-mail me directly or comment on the actual written posts of my projects instead of on the YouTube site/app <3 Thank you!

Patreon

After a somewhat brief run on Patreon, I’ve decided to close this social media avenue. Although there’s some wonderful artists on this site and it’s a great way for some people to gather support, I found that many of the functions of Patreon were repetitive for me personally. And while the monetary support is nice, Patreon and Paypal BOTH take a percentage of my money there, and I feel like that’s a waste considering I don’t really enjoy using it. I didn’t find the site navigation very helpful or intuitive unfortunately :/ So bye bye Patreon! Thank you so much to everyone who helped support me there. January will be the last month my patrons will be billed for their tier. If you want to continue to support Morale Fiber on a regular basis, new avenues for donations will be set up soon – or you can just do a one-time Tip Jar payment here on my blog at any point!

Magic Fantastic Crochet Atelier

This Facebook group centered around my crochet designs (and including other gorgeous fantasy based crochet designs) has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in association with Morale Fiber – we opened in 2019 and have been sharing so many amazing projects for the past few years. Everyone has been incredibly kind and supportive in this group – which is why it pains me to make the decision to close it. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to monitor the group as well as I should to make sure it is a safe environment and to maintain the quality of the group’s content. However, there are SO MANY great crochet groups online, I feel that I have to allow my own needs to take precedent and I consistently see myself fall short when it comes to making the time to maintain and check this group. As an alternative to sharing projects based on my designs in this group, I will try to go back to sharing featured projects via my main business page news feeds 🙂

Here are just a few great crochet groups I know of that might interest MFCA members looking for new groups: Advanced Tunisian Crochet (you don’t have to be advanced already to join, and many people post Elf Coat projects here), Hooked on Tunisian Crochet (more potential Elf Coat discussion), Mildly Offensive Fiber Artists (fun and whimsical stuff, lots of NSFW type projects though), Freeform Crochet World Group (absolutely inspiring – I want to do more freeform!), Boho Crafty Souls (Crochet-centric but not exclusively crochet group for all funky fiber artists, hosted by Starlily)

Twitter

This social media channel has not been one that I’ve been very active on, and the majority of my posts over the years were automatic updates that were sent out whenever there was a new blog post here. While that’s nice, I don’t prefer to leave accounts sitting around on social media sites that I don’t actively log on to (the risk of being hacked but also the risk of people trying to contact me and never getting replies… !) So I’ve already deactivated my Twitter account – I just don’t use it! Thanks to everyone on Twitter for sharing my posts over the years <3 <3

Moving Forward

Of course, the things which are moving away from my to-do list are making room for brighter, newer fiber ventures! I am still working on filming a tutorial for the Flower Child Pullover shaping & joining rounds, finally just finished my first draft of the newest winter sweater coat design (excited for that) and am developing a fun new free hat pattern that I’m totally enchanted with 😉 So stay tuned here on my blog as the morale-boosting continues!

-MF