Every make
has a story.
Strava for the things you make
Merino records the making of things one session at a time, and lets you share the whole journey: the tries, the mistakes and the fixes, not just the finished piece. I built it for one person, my wife, who crochets, paints and 3D prints. Every decision got checked against her: what she'd actually tap, what she'd skip, and what she'd want her friends to see.
The best part of making gets lost
Crafters already keep records, just scattered ones: a row count on a sticky note, progress photos buried in the camera roll, a project six weeks in with no trace of how it got there. Most craft apps are inventories of patterns, yarn stash and finished pieces. They treat a project as a thing to file. But the part worth keeping is the middle, like the evening she ripped out twelve rows and started over, and nothing was capturing it.
The session is the heart of it
Strava doesn't ask you to manage your runs. It records them, and the history builds itself. Merino works the same way. She opens it when she sits down to work and again when she's done, never in between. Starting takes one tap. If something happens mid-session, like a tangle or a print failing at layer 40, she can snap a photo in one tap, because that moment is gone by the time she finishes. The writing happens at the end, on a save card that is the journal entry. Timelines, totals and the finished moment all build up from sessions on their own.
Designing with her, not just for her
The first build went to her on TestFlight for a two-week trial, and I used it alongside her. The most useful signal was what got skipped or worked around. Mid-session photos went from an afterthought to part of the core loop. Friends "cheering her on" became friends "following along," because sports language borrowed from Strava felt wrong next to a cardigan. And tapping a step now opens it to read, with the photos and the conversation, while editing sits behind a button, because looking back at your work and fixing a typo are different jobs.
Failure is part of the story
A failed 3D print isn't something to hide. It's a step in the journey, logged with what went wrong, in a soft blush rather than an alarming red. Rows she rips out count as do-overs, not lost progress. When she marks a project finished, Merino shows the payoff: total hours, number of sessions, and her first photo beside her last.
A journey, not a feed
One switch shares a project as a web page anyone with the link can open, no app needed. Friends can leave a heart or share a thought right away, and it's held until she adds them, so nobody waits at a locked door. There are no follower counts, no streaks to break and no algorithm. The feed is chronological and finite, and it ends with "You're caught up." Private notes live in their own place, so no sharing setting can ever expose them.
Her photos carry the color
The look is chalky: a cream page, deep ink text, and a single lavender reserved for the one action that matters, Start. Soft blush, butter and mint tint each craft without competing with her work. Type is rounded and friendly, and every tap answers with a small spring and a haptic. Her photos are the richest thing on screen, so the interface stays quiet around them.
