It’s wild that we started this journey in the summer of 2020. With a global pandemic, an American president inciting violence, and the murder of George Floyd, it felt like the world was ending. With so much chaos, crafting was more necessary than ever. Either as a means of escape, self-soothing, activism, or a million other reasons, knitting and crocheting was something tangible and controllable.
So when the Ravelry redesign released, my safe crafting bubble was also shattered. It’s not that crafting wasn’t always ableist, I just wasn’t aware of it before. But then I couldn’t unsee it or unknow it. So I had to do something about it. With Rommel’s help I knew we could create our own version. And with your enthusiasm and support, we knew there was a whole community in need of something different.
So we started working on Fiber Club. A year and a half later and we’re still working on the first release. While we’re making progress and the app is coming to life, we have quite a bit to do before we can release the MVP. And with only one month until the end of the year, it looks like we’ll have to push the release date into 2022.
We keep facing issues with the Search & Filter Milestone that prevent us from moving onto the next one. Different designers list patterns in many different ways. Sizes can be numeric, 1-20, alphabetical, A-Z, or use clothing-like standards like Small, Medium, Large, etc. In addition, different patterns might be one-size-fits-all, they can have very detailed measurements, or they can have multiple colors. It unfortunately took many weeks of iteration, both on the technical data modelling side and on the UI design side, to get to something we’re happy with. Discovering new amazing patterns is key to Fiber Club, and searching and filtering is the basis for all of it. While progress might be slow, we think this is one example where we are blessed to be able to take some time to do things the right way that will work well into the future.
It is hard to write these updates when it doesn’t seem like we’re making much progress. But I keep having to remind myself that change is slow. And methodical. And sometimes painful. Even though we don’t have a product yet, we’re much closer to making Fiber Club a reality than not. After we finish getting the search and filtering just right, we will do a Settings & Accessibility milestone, followed by a Polishing & Refinement milestone, and then we’ll do a soft launch to gather more feedback.
As always, we are immensely thankful for your support. Thank you for joining us on this journey. Stay safe and happy holidays.
Originally posted on November 30, 2021.