2025 Recap (And My 2026 Goals)

We’re less than a week into 2026 and I’m tucked up in bed in the UK feeling rough. Yay for the first bug of the year! Better to get it under the belt now I guess… 😆

All joking aside, I figured it was a good time to write up a recap of 2025 for me and the blog as well as my 2026 goals. Which are big and exciting, truth be told!

I didn’t get a ton of feedback on my monthly update posts, so I’m not sure I’ll bother with them again this year… I’m someone who will have an idea, start it to see if there’s anything ‘in it’ and then pivot away if it’s a time waste, and I get the feeling monthly updates were a waste of my time insofar as making notes throughout the month and then writing them up.

I may still do the odd update each quarter, but otherwise it’ll be back to these annual catch ups! Which I do enjoy as they help me to see all that I have achieved in the year and then I set better goals and intentions for the year ahead. Without them its very easy for two things to happen:

1. I feel like I didn’t achieve anything, because I’m too busy just keeping going and
2. Looking back helps me to look forward and see what it is that I want to achieve in the year ahead.

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog entry and you will not learn anything from reading this other than my thoughts and feelings, which will help you to know me better! 🙂

What I Achieved in 2025

I’m going to break this down into business, financial and personal so that those disinterested in one can skip to their preferred section if they want to.

Emails: This was the year of stepping up and being more ‘visible’. Though if you were to visit my business Instagram or Facebook pages you’d argue strongly that this wasn’t the case. But I did spend more time emailing my readers with 27 ‘For the Weekend’ emails and 17 ‘random’ emails. Forty four emails in 52 weeks is quite an achievement for me!

Blog Usability: 2025 was also the year of tidying up the blog side of my business. The blog is a ‘top of funnel’ part of my business (biz techie term) which helps people to find my newsletter and the products I have available. By improving the website in early 2025 with a new theme and easier navigation, I then spent time throughout the year updating or deleting blog posts that didn’t feel as good as they could be.

Online Shop: As well as the blog side, I also created a new website under my own name, which acts as a shop front. This is where I have sewing patterns, my online courses and my membership, and is also an ‘ad free’ experience for those who decide to take their learning with me to the next level.

Pattern Rebrand: I know it may not seem like a priority, but ‘rebranding’ my patterns was an important goal of mine, as I wanted to go into 2026 without any excuses to start getting my patterns out there. Taking the time to develop the design of my pattern branding (covers and interior styling) has meant that I am confident with what’s coming!

Free Sewing Patterns: A small detail that I haven’t talked about much, but shortly after graduating my fashion degree I worked as a freelance designer for a London based children’s wear brand. So when my niece had her first baby, it was a natural thing for me to create a onesie sewing pattern and then make it available for free. It’s my most popular free product to date!

2026 Pattern Release Plan: In the years between studying fashion design and today, I have created hundreds of patterns, and in 2025 I worked through what would make great releases and which should be put on the back burner. I then implemented a ‘system’ – much like a critical path for a fashion collection – to make sure that I stay on track in 2026!

Learn to Sew: My first online course in a few years – Learn to Sew – came about because of the number of sewing beginners asking me for more help. So, in April I started creating it, then lost all the videos when my external hard drive failed, and remade them all between August and October. I have since taken a lot back out as students who had worked through the course materials said it was ‘too overwhelming’ but upcoming updates will make it better for everyone.

Creative Dressmaking: This was a membership that I have made available on two previous occasions but I always closed it and refunded members within a couple of weeks, because each time I launched it, my Mum’s health would get worse and my attention wouldn’t be where it needed to be to support members. As my mum passed away in late 2021, and everything seems to be ‘safe’ (🤞) I decided that I would go for it for a third and final time in November, and this time – success!

Pattern Making Course: The hope had been to have this ready for summer, but another instance of losing all the recorded videos in the aforementioned hard drive failure meant that it has to be redone from scratch. The plan has been recreated and it will be coming!

YouTube: I have had my YouTube channel for a number of years, and 2025 was the year I finally hit 10,000 subscribers. Not that it means much at this point, because the number of ‘returning’ viewers is low, but it does help me with my 2026 business goals.

Website Visitors: After the rise of AI in 2023, and search engines deciding to become answer engines instead, the way people find my website and products has changed drastically in two years. I was quietly happy that the number of website visitors from all sources hovered around 284,000 in 2025 – though this is down from 481,000 in 2024 and almost 1 million in 2023!! – but it could so easily have been much worse.

Financial Achievements 2025

I don’t normally touch on the financial side of my business, because it isn’t something business owners are encouraged to publicly talk about, but as times have been hard and people complain about the ads on my blog or the price of my products, it feels more pertinent than ever to highlight the actual income earned from all that I do, because I really am not ‘ripping off’ anyone!

And then add on time costs of hosting my blog (£29 per month), the online shop costs ($49 per month), the software used to edit photos, videos, and create sewing patterns and booklets (£40 per month) and other smaller monthly costs associated with having a business.

I will talk more about how this will shift in 2026 for those interested.

Emails To My Readers

I’m a week into 2026 and haven’t yet sent an email to my readers which is a shoddy start to the year, but it is my intention to email at least twice per week this year. It does mean more unsubscribes but I also realise that people who unsubscribe were likely never ‘my people’ anyway.

I get reply emails frequently from many of my readers and looking back through the historical data I can see that those who joined my Creative Dressmaking membership have been reading my emails for a year or more. Those are ‘my people’, and it is them who I am here to help. And if more frequent emails is key to that, then that is the way to go!

I also feel that in the world of AI, building relationships with real people is important, and the only way to show that this is a business of human-ness is to show up more as myself!

New Blog Tutorials and Guides

2025 was the year of tidying up the blog side of my business and updating older content throughout the year, so now it’s time to start getting new tutorials and guides up on the blog, to help more people realise their dream of designing and making their own wardrobe of gorgeous clothes.

Since 2019, the blog joined a premium ad network so that I could 1) pay my rent and 2) continue making tutorials and guides free for those who needed them. I still intend to make as much content as I can free for those who are on a lower income – which is why I will still have some ads on this site as it really does seem fair to provide great information for free access to those who really need it – but my more in-depth content will be behind a ‘paywall’ to prevent AI and the increase of spammers ‘learning’ (actually stealing) from my hard work while reducing my reach and income. Hoping that you can understand this!

New Sewing and Pattern Making Products

If you took note of the financials further up, you’ll have noticed that the only income that increased in 2025 compared to 2024 was generated by my online shop. This was strategic, as the trials of 2023 and 2024 taught me that I really need to diversify the sources of income so that I’m not left hanging by a thread when one or more goes awry – and the only one I really have any ‘control’ over is sales of my own products.

YouTube Channel

Key to getting more people into my online shop is ramping up my YouTube channel. I have been pretty quiet there for two years now – in 2024 as I was working on a book which was incredibly time intensive, and in 2025 as I was ‘getting things in order’ for product creation and sales.

I also spent time during those two years creating videos for my hobby art channel, which taught me a lot about creating videos, getting them in front of new audiences and working with sponsors too.

Now that my ducks are lined up, I feel ready to ramp up the video content for 2026 on my main YouTube channel, with the aim of directing people from my videos to my paid products.

Pinterest

The final bow in my bag (is that actually a saying or did I mangle it?) is to get back to using Pinterest daily to encourage more people to visit my blog. While the data shows that YouTube is better at moving people from my videos to my products, I have seen that tutorials and guides on my blog do increase the number of people when shared strategically to Pinterest, so I intend to really dig in there too.

Feel free to follow me on Pinterest right here, so you can be inspired by the pins I’ll be sharing this year! And do use the ‘pin it’ button here on the save pictures to your own boards!

I hope this has been an insightful post for those who read to the end. As always, thank you so much for being here. To those who have spent time on the blog, thank you – you help keep the lights on here at TCC. To those who have bought one of my products in 2025, bigger thanks, you’re helping me to build a bigger and brighter future as we go into this 10th year!

And I think that is a wrap! Big hugs to you all and the warmest wishes for the year ahead!