I find going into a new year I tend to focus on things I didn't get accomplished and forget to look back at what I did accomplish. I'll be honest, 2014 wasn't the best year for a variety of reasons Trying to plan and be excited and optimistic for 2015 is a little tough when I can only see what went wrong and what I didn't finish.
I set out to make a cute little graphic of the new Squshies we released this year and at first I was a bit disappointed that we only added 15 new animals. I thought there were more! Then I started to remember other things that happened this year and how much actually was accomplished, quite a lot! So to remind myself of what went right this year and to hopefully stir up my enthusiasm for next year I thought I'd stop and write a whole post about 2014.
For starters we added 15 new critters to the Squshies line up this year, but that doesn't even include the 31 monkeys from March Monkey Madness.
I started researching the idea of March Monkey Madness late in December of 2013. I choose monkeys, sketched, finalized, cut, stitched and wrote stories for all 31 different monkeys in 2014. I was right when that 15 new critters number seemed low to me, there were 31 more!
Since it happened so early in the year it is easy to forget that this project was something from this year. I learned so much about monkeys and it was a really fun and challenging project that started and finished in 2014.
We only made a few pieces of hoop art in 2014, but we did try some new and exciting things with them. Making alliteration hoops is super fun. We've got a few more ideas for those in the future.
The more realistic style bird hoops were really exciting to make. We've been bouncing around ideas for things we can do with this more realistic approach.
In 2012 and 2013 I was terrible about keeping the blog updated. A goal for 2014 was to blog more frequently, and I did! I blogged every weekday for 3 solid months. After that the schedule became about 3 days a week, minus some mini breaks and vacations. We did a bunch of posts with animal facts and we hosted a monthly animal doodle challenge, both of which we're brainstorming how to bring back for 2015. I kept this up until sometime in September when blogging had to be set aside for holiday and show prep.
Speaking of shows...
We did a lot of shows in 2014, including our very first Wondercon where we met Felicia Day! She even took home one of our Super Hero Hippos and showed him off in this video. In 2013 we only did one show, Designercon. We wanted to do more events in 2014 and we did! We went to 7 shows this year.
We also had projects that were never finished or barely started. We experimented with putting Squshies in frames, making prints and cards of felt pictures and tried new things with needle felting. We also released the first of hopefully many patterns to come and finally started our monthly newsletter. We also launched this new website where we can have our shop and blog all in the same place!
Maybe a lot of our projects didn't get finished this year, but we definitely tried lots of new things and we did complete some of them. I hope you enjoyed looking back at 2014 with me. It has definitely helped put me in a better mindset for 2015.
How was your 2014? Anything you are looking forward or hoping to see from us in 2015? What was your favorite thing about Squshies in 2014?