Starting my 'Year in Craft' for 2025

A couple of years ago I ended up doing a crafting challenge, my Year in Craft 2022. tl;dr, I tried to spend at least one minute every day doing some crafts, tracked it in my bullet journal, and created an unconventional data visualisation from the results.

For the last two years, I’ve kept to the same principles, trying to do at least some crafting every day, but didn’t worry too much about the tracking because… well, been there done that. But now January has rolled around again, I’m feeling a little more enthused, and I think I’m going to do something slightly different this year. I’ll explain where my head’s at in a bit, but here’s the backstory.

A while back I randomly read a book about fashion psychology. It introduced me to a really great approach to buying and wearing clothes, which I’ve kept thinking about since. Dress for the day you want to have; buy for the way you want to feel when you open your wardrobe; communicate your personality with colours and styles. And so on. Since then I’ve been using a wardrobe manager app called StyleBook to try to do this, and make the most of my regular wardrobe. You take pictures of all of your clothes, enter them in this app, and then you can put together outfits, log them on a calendar, and - most exciting for me - see stats. What you’ve worn most, what brands you own most of, how much an item has cost per wear, and how much a full outfit costs.

This has been really helpful for me to take a hard look at what I have. It (and a long-distance move) helped me let go of some tattered old crap that I really should have retired years before, and update them with pieces I’ll actually wear and have utility across more outfits. And something that has brought me no small amount of joy is adding the brand ‘hand-made’ into the database. Adding an entry in StyleBook makes that item feel like it’s really done, and it makes slice of the pie chart grow, along with my levels of self-satisfaction/smugness.

What this revealed with my hand-made items is that… I just don’t wear some of them. I spend hours and hours, over spans of weeks or months, only to stick the items in the drawer and never wear them because they just don’t match my style. Case in point: my Volt Sweater. I spent months knitting that (and, um, not making it while it sat in the corner waiting for me to block and seam it, but let’s not dwell on that). It went with me from Brighton to London to Cardiff and back multiple times.

I have worn it once.

It’s not that it’s poorly made, or that it doesn’t fit, or that I don’t like the pattern. I love the pattern, it sparks ✨joy✨ just to look at. Just… not to wear. Something about it just doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t feel like me when I put it on. So, it languishes in a drawer, from which it glares balefully at me whenever I open it. And it’s not the only thing - a similar fate has befallen Murderpigs and Pluie (though they’re not helped by being horribly itchy).

This is obviously a shameful waste of time and money, and I would probably have realised that if I’d looked at the items that I have worn to death. Leek cardigan. Oxide cardigan. Flora cardigan. Clean, simple lines that can be thrown on over basically any other outfit, that matchies or contrasts with the patterned fabrics I love rather than competing with them for attention. That’s pretty obvious but, I wondered, what other patterns are there in my successful makes? What even counts as a successful make? I plan to find out.

This year, instead of just crafting every day, I’m challenging myself to wear at least one of my hand-made items every single day.

To that end, I’ve set myself up a spreadsheet. In it, I have a list of all my handmade clothes, with some details like the colour, the type (cardigan, socks, etc), how I made it (sewing, knitting, etc). Then I also have a ‘wear log’, where I can say for each day which items I’ve worn. As the year goes on, I’ll be able to generate aggregate stats for each item, understanding which of them I wear the most, but also see patterns in garment types. And charts. So many potential charts and visualisations. I’m excited.

I can predict right now that cardigans and socks will probably be on top at the end of the year, but I’ll be interested to see what the colour spread looks like. I want to introduce more colours into my wardrobe, particularly mid-range colours (as opposed to pastels) and warm tones, and hopefully this will let me see and plan future items to fit into the mix.