Hi everyone,
Bruno here, and Ariane who’s helped to write this and says hello! It’s been more than a while since our last update (over five years ago). So much has been going on, and we wanted to share a little bit about what’s been happening over the last while, both personally and with Textillia, and then talk about how we’ll be moving forward with the project.
As a few of you know, the last several years have been very difficult for us - forgive us for taking so long to share this more publicly, but we were in survival mode and then in limbo for so long, and wanted to have more to tell you all before sharing. In the midst of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Ariane went through a catastrophic, multi-year, near deadly medical ordeal that put us through several years of unmitigated hell. Somehow with the support of her mom, her friends, myself, and one supportive doctor that stepped in at the eleventh hour, she managed to pull through and eventually start to recover. But suffice it to say, it has not been a good time for either of us (read: living nightmare). Fast forward to today, thankfully Ariane is slowly starting to recover, and we are trying to adjust to this new normal. But unfortunately, she’s continued to have immense challenges with getting appropriate medical care, both for her disease, and now on top of it, the multiple serious medical injuries she’s sustained, which have affected her physical and cognitive capacity pretty significantly. On top of that, one of the mismanaged treatments dramatically worsened the pain and arthritis in her hands, even further limiting her ability to do computer work.
While the day to day is still often difficult and some major uncertainties remain, at least things feel a little less dire now (you might even see her start to pop up on the site again a little if she feels up for it!) That said, she has virtually no medical care or specialists now, and is being refused further treatment (long story). After everything she’s been through, this is the last thing we needed and is quite devastating. To try and get more medical support and keep giving her a chance to recover from this ordeal, we made multiple Hail Mary trips down the US in 2024-25 for expert consults and testing, at great personal expense and effort, which helped to solidify what was going on and treatment options for her disease. Unfortunately that did not lead to any improvement in the medical situation here in Vancouver, nor access to specialists or treatment due to both discrimination and the dire state of the medical system here especially for complex patients. We are facing the reality that if she wants to continue to try and recover and get treatment, we will likely have to move - at least temporarily, but likely longterm - to somewhere else with better care for her. Given everything going on in the US, and my having taken a full time job last year with my longtime primary client, moving to the states where she has some good doctors is no longer an option, so we are looking at other provinces with better specialist care (we have made some progress establishing care in another province, but are not at a point where we want to share more details).
It’s been a lot to deal with (understatement), with Ariane being so sick the last few years, and me having to take extra time off work to take care of her for the worst few years of this. Understandably, I’ve had less time to dedicate to Textillia, but we didn’t want to shut it down prematurely, so I have continued basic maintenance for the site, software updates, and helping out in the forums. Now that things are a bit more stable, and will hopefully continue to move in the right direction, we’ve had a bit more space to think about what to do with Textillia as well. (Ariane has posted her own video update about this on the Textillia Instagram if you want to watch that as well.)
When Ariane wrote our previous blog post before this nightmare happened, we were getting ready to launch our membership system. That was postponed for obvious reasons - we felt a responsibility to a certain level of service once people started paying for it. It's been sitting completed, waiting to be rolled out along with some great new features. Given everything that’s happened, we finally made the difficult decision over the holidays to eat our losses on what we’ve invested in building and running Textillia, and permanently wind down the business aspect of it, i.e. we will not be launching the membership system or charging for the site going forward. We just cannot run it at a level where we feel comfortable charging people money to use it. The company was officially dissolved a few weeks ago, and the site's About page, FAQ, etc. have been updated accordingly. It’s very sad to give up on this, one of the many dreams we've had to let go of during this ordeal, but it is necessary as it was costing a significant amount of money to run the business side of it which was required to be able to accept payments for the memberships. That said, we did not want to take the site down and dismantle the project entirely. Ariane and so many others in the community have put years of work into logging projects, patterns, and stash data on the site. We know nobody wants to lose that.
We decided for the foreseeable future to keep Textillia running as a hobby project - so that those who’ve come to love it can continue to use it, even if we aren’t able to expand and develop it in the way we originally hoped. This will cost us much less, and hopefully with a little support from those who continue to use it, we can make it work, and I can continue to keep the site online with minimal maintenance. Since we no longer plan to launch the membership system, I’m also hoping to spend some time disentangling the new features we built to be rolled out with it, so that those can still be used.
While we have managed to stay afloat with some family support, obviously the monthly costs in addition to unpaid time spent on developing it have been a substantial financial investment for us, at a less than ideal time. But we always believed it would be a worthwhile investment in the community, and one we would be happy we saw through long term. We know we have every reason to just shut it down, but we care about this project as much as ever, and all we need is a small dedicated community’s support to keep it going, so everyone who wants to can keep using it as long as it makes sense. We greatly appreciate any contributions you can make towards the costs of keeping the project going. You can do that via our Donorbox page, which can do both one-time and monthly recurring donations.
And also, feel free to leave a comment on the post here with well wishes - Ariane could greatly use some words of encouragement and love right now, as she is feeling quite worn down from everything that’s happened, what's still ahead, and the uphill battle she continues to have to fight. Despite the massive hurdles we’ve faced, we hope you’ll stick with us. We have poured our hearts into building what we believe is a really wonderful resource and community, and we hope Textillia can stick around! It’s been really great to see people continue to use the site, despite our having to scale back on active development and Ariane having to step back from her duties on the site and social media. We hope that despite this change of pace and goals for the project, it can continue to be useful. And of course we very much hope that Ariane can continue to recover more with more time and better medical care, and do some sewing again one day, as she’s been dreaming of doing this entire time.
We also want to acknowledge this is a really difficult time for so many people, and really hope you’re all doing as well as possible and keeping safe out there in these wild times. Please don't put yourself out if you're struggling as we're okay in the greater scheme of things, but if you’re able to support Textillia by making a donation or buying a shirt, we would appreciate it more than ever right now. Thank you for the support!
Love and solidarity,
Bruno + Ariane