Making up for dead air

My erstwhile dedication to posting more has reappeared.

It’s been an interesting half year so far, primarily because I hard launched Evergreen Sewing in February. It’s been off to the races since then.

The charts for Evergreen show revenue doing the tech industry approved Up And To The Right thing, which is nice. It’s not super up (and the “to the right” is a date-based thing out of my contril), and it’s not yet profitable, but it’s encouraging. Expenses are too high relative to gross revenue, so that’s something I’ll need to work on.

As I spend more time with Evergreen matters, I (predictably?) care less about the tech industry in general and open source in specific. I really do feel like both of these have left me, more than I’m leaving them. Every morning I still read all of the headlines in my tech and open source RSS feeds, but lately I find myself wondering how long it’ll be until I delete them. Also, I wonder whether I’ll miss them or feel relief at the removal of noise.

Thus far I’m not hiding the fact that I’m working on Evergreen Sewing, but I’m not broadcasting it, either. Evergreen is canonically plural in all communications, and my overtly public social and blog accounts don’t mention it at all. For now. It’s a way not to discourage people who might want to throw an open source-related contract my way, yes. But it’s also a way to avoid dealing with the questions and other interactions that come with a career change. I don’t have the mental space for that right now.

The business is trending closely toward a full-time endeavour. A few more customers and/or machine sales (more of these, please!) per week and it’s solidly full-time. I find I very much enjoy those days where I get to spend most of my time puzzling over a machine in my workshop (except when the machines and/or my confidence are especially vexing).

So far the people I’ve met in the sewing-related industry are lovely, helpful, and supportive, but I know it’s largely a selection bias thing. I know this because sewing machine repair has its own mailing lists and those cultures are too reminiscent of old school open source lists. As a result, I’ve found myself avoiding the lists. That’s a shame, as I could learn a lot from them, but the mods are all grey-hairs themselves and don’t see anything wrong with the culture. Sometimes I have to stop myself from diving deeply into the list community so I can position myself as a future moderator, where I’ll be in a position to fix the dysfunctional culture. Yes, I could do that. No, I don’t want that burden.

Yeah, so that’s been my life for 2026: Evergreen Sewing. It’s a thing, and I’m making a good go at it.