By Voskop
Some weeks ago at work, I saw a flyer advertising a "hidden hobbies" showcase day in late September, and they were looking for signups. I thought, ha, sure, I'll bring some wool and my wheel on the bus and confuse my colleagues, and signed up. Two days later, the thought had marinated a bit: I spoke to Karak and we agreed on the idea of offering to give free spinning workshops at our home.
We did three in the span of a week, which was exhausting and we're not doing so many in such a short span again, but it was fun, and the group decided to start a groupchat on WhatsApp. A few more days later, the thought was still marinating along. The freshly minted groupchat went to the local petting zoo to pick up some fresh fleece for home prep and spinning, because free and local is fun and good, and when the nice lady who was running the place asked for a name so she could shout us out on Facebook, the name "Fiber Guild Groningen" flopped out. Later that day, we saw the promised post pop up, and thought, well shit, better go make that a real thing that people can google and find!
The thought has not yet finished marinating (will it ever?), but there's a lot of dreaming done and an okay bit of prep too - for example, this website is now live, though still a little bit bare. The spinning group needs to set a regular meetup date, I've joined the national spinning guild and want to put our group on their national masterlist of spinning groups, there's lots of tech I'm dreaming of trying out for this, etcetera.
The dream we have is to connect local fibercrafters (and interested future fibercrafters) with each other and local sellers and suppliers of wool, be it meatspace yarn stores, good national webshops, or the shepherd down the road who pays to have their fleeces disposed of every year. I want this to be a space for the locals of Groningen to share wisdom and knowledge and build a community out of it. There's so many resources for the center/south of the country (as a Belgian, I still don't know what corner of their country exactly the Dutch mean when they refer to the various cardinal directions of it. What do you mean, that's the east? That's the north!!) and there needed to be one for Groningen too.
We'll be doing a lot of writing in the coming days. And hopefully a good bit of outreach in the coming weeks and months. We both have obligations and conditions that do not allow us to bang out as much work on this project as we would like to in a day, but slow growth can be a very good thing for initiatives such as this. You can strike the iron when it's hot, but you shouldn't eat cookies straight out the oven.
Next on the list for this Guild is filling out the site more (sections such as local shops, webshops, guides, YouTube channels that we've found entertaining and/or useful, offerings of stuff or lessons by members, and posts by hopefully also members other than us), setting up a Ravelry page (free forum!! and peeking at people's projects and stash trackers!!) and setting up a newsletter. Karak and I are also both international, hence the initial setup in English, but I want to allow people to toggle to Dutch for the non-post pages, too.
That's me for now, see you again hopefully soon with the next update. I'm excited, I hope you are too.