by Voskop
We've been busy the past ten days! Therefore, time for an update with a changelog and future plans.
A list of things we've done:
- Added Activities, Yellow Pages, Resources, and Guides page
- Made a Ravelry group and set up a few threads
- Made an email address for the guild itself (you can find it on the Contact page)
- Karak prettied up the CSS a bit and made a favicon
- Requested to get listed as a spinning group on the national spinning group's site, and there's a good chance we'll put in a little piece for in the monthly members' newsletter there too
- Went to Maakfestival in/around the Forum and met more fibercraft people (which we've told about the guild and then listed on the Yellow Pages)
- Voskop has started keeping an actual eye on several Dutch Ravelry groups in which there is good self-advertisement going on, so we may yet take some links from there and put them up here too eventually
Lots of things so far, and we're now regarding the website/setup as being solid for a first version. Next on our list to do are the following:
- Do some outreach to people we've linked on the site, local organisations, and local groups/people that we already know do fiberarts, to get out the word that we exist and see if anyone wants to also come keep an eye on us.
- Make a flyer for the guild in general and start carrying those around + dropping them in community centers.
- Tour de Fleece! Keep an eye on the Ravelry thread in our group to track our progress. For now we're in prep stage which for Voskop means picking some of the endless Ouessant and for Karak means making cool rolags.
- Set up RSS for these blog posts, since they're kind of the updates for the website and guild for now.
- Make the website also Dutch. Don't yet know how to do this but that's what search engines are for.
That's also a significant amount of stuff, but we've got a holiday coming up soon and other personal projects which are now in need of attention, so we figure we will slowly get to the above list and see if we can get traction locally in the meantime already.
We do also have a list of things we're deliberately not yet starting until the guild is a bit bigger/more established. That's because it would be a comparatively big amount of effort, and it wouldn't make sense to do it yet with the guild still so small. Those things are:
- Setting up a monthly newsletter. Needs a few people to send it to before it becomes worth it, and we're hoping to source articles from the members themselves, of which there are currently not many.
- Voskop doing more Javascript around the website. There's several pages now that are a list of links with a short summary. I want to add tags to them and filter buttons at the top of the site so you can pick "sewing" or "yarn" and then only have the relevant entries show up. This is going to become more necessary as we pick up more links and knowledge, but for now it's still fine.
- Pre-emptively adding more events to the Activities page. Right now we're just adding whatever events we (Karak & Voskop) are definitely going to, so it's not an accurate Northern-Dutch overview of what's going on in the fiber sphere. We're hoping to get members talking about events, then we can look them up and list them on here, and then maybe multiple people can go together.
That's our three lists for today: past, present and future. We hope to see you soon in our email inbox, in the Ravelry group - consider joining the site, even if not for the thousands upon thousands of free patterns, it's really handy to keep track of projects! And of course the forum is there - or in WhatsApp. We will be hard at work behind the scenes again with the outreach, and we hope to make another update post here sometime around the beginning of Tour de Fleece 2026.
See you then!