I recently started a new part-time job, which unfortunately means a bit less time in the studio for me. It has been a difficult adjustment to make over the past few weeks, but thankfully now the fog seems to be lifting, and there does seem to be enough room in my brain, and room in my day to balance my business and my job (and even my relationship and friendships on good days too!)
While adjusting to my new schedule, I have been thinking about how I should be spending my time. As time is now more limited than it was before, I already find myself constantly asking myself "Is this a priority?" or "Is this really how I should be spending the 4 hours I have at the studio today?" (Some good definitely comes out of being pushed for time!) This has got me questioning what kinds of blog posts I should be writing, what patterns I should be producing, and overall what types of content I should be creating for the people who buy my patterns and visit my blog. I have been ruminating over this for a couple of weeks now, and then it occurred to me, why don't I just ask? It's all well and good for me to sit here bending my brain trying to put myself in your shoes, but at the end of the day, I am not the one reading my blog, or using my patterns, you are!
I have created a survey with some questions about what you would like to see from In the Folds in the future and what I could be doing better (among other things) and I would love if you could spare some time to take it. I must warn you, it's not a quick two-minute survey. I tried to avoid multiple choice when I could, as although it makes it much faster to look at the data, I'm not really into sticking people in four separate boxes and then calling it a day! I really want to get a true idea of who you are, why you sew and what you are looking for, so that I can create content that will actually benefit this community of ours. It takes a really long time to create a tutorial and even more to create a pattern, so I may as well check-in to see that it's something that is actually needed in the world before taking the time to create it.
To show my appreciation for your time, by doing the survey you can enter a draw to win your choice of pattern from my online shop. I know I don't have a huge amount of patterns available at this stage, so if you are lucky enough to win and you already own both my patterns, then you can save the credit for a future pattern release. Prizes will be drawn in 14 days from today (i.e. 13 March 2017, 9am AEST), so get the survey done before then to be in with a chance!
I also realised that it wasn't fair for me to ask you you take the time to sit down and answer these questions, and for me not to do the same. So I took the survey too! You can receive my responses to the survey as an email if you like. Just enter your email address when prompted in the survey (don't worry, your email address will be used for nothing spammy, just for you to hear my answers!) and it will come straight to your inbox.
To help me make In the Folds even better, please click the button below.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me create content that will be interesting, useful and beneficial to this community!
