Karen Turner Stitching Life textile artist stitching by hand

Threads of life

You may have noticed my hand-dyed threads have been temporarily unavailable in the shop this week.

Recently there have been a few hard weeks, and I’m currently having another very full week arranging a residential care home placement for my mother, who is unfortunately no longer able to continue living alone. I’ve been unable to manage the shop on top of all that.

There has been a different kind of sewing. When I was at school (and that’s a very long time ago) my mother patiently sewed name labels into all my school clothes. And now I am doing the same for her.

It is a strange feeling. The wheel turns, time carries us along, and at some point we come full circle.

I need a few more days to gather together everything she will need, and also to get myself to a point where I can think straight, but threads will be available again soon – probably next week some time. Please keep checking the shop if you’re waiting. Thank you for your patience.

Comments are off on this one; I will be back soon (ish).

June 2026 daily stitching

And here we are, halfway through the year already.

The month soon fills up.

Today was a simple leaf outline, and you can see it in action on my YouTube channel.

This month has presented difficulties and challenges, most of which are now ongoing. The best policy so far has been to keep calm and stitch.

July ahead:

And the year so far:

Amazing what a few minutes a day can do.

Delays

This is just a short update on availability (my own, and my threads). Unfortunately, last week was not the relaxing break I’d been hoping for. There has been a family emergency which will take significant time and effort to resolve.

The shop is now open again for PDFs only, because they are automated and require little input from me, but threads will continue to be unavailable until such time as I am able to be here more reliably for packaging and posting.

When threads do become available again the shop may continue to open and close fairly erratically, depending on where I need to be and what I need to do, and I may not be able to respond to email enquiries as promptly as usual. If you find the shop closed, please just check back in a day or two.

Comments are off on this one, but thank you for your patience and understanding while I navigate the very unpredictable path ahead.

Quilter-couching

You probably know couching is one of my favourite techniques, and I’m currently conducting an experiment to see how effectively couching might substitute for quilting.

I don’t often get as much time as I’d like for my own work but I’ve been squeezing in an hour here and there on this little quilt that began in June 2024 as a heap of little patches that needed stitching together.

It’s hand-pieced, from lots of vintage and contemporary scraps – past and present sitting side by side, as they do in life – and most of the stitching is either couching or very simple embroidery.

The whole thing measures about a square yard or so.

The red circle is about 10 inches in diameter and began as lines of straight stitch. That didn’t give a prominent enough amount of colour, so I’ve threaded the straight stitches with a fine wool yarn.

The vertical lines are still very much in progress, and there are lots more still to do. I’m couching a fine silk bourette yarn with quilting cotton thread, and that seems to be holding the layers together pretty well. The backing is lightweight calico and the batting is Hobbs wool.

It’s all very much a work in progress. This little quilt has had many false starts and many unpickings in the two years of its construction, but I think it seems happier now and we’ll keep going until we get to wherever it is.

In other news – I’ll be taking some time out next week, so the shop will be closed temporarily for a few days while I attend to other things. Please be patient if you need to get in touch as I may not be checking emails every day.

From ‘In Which Rabbit has a busy day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings’ by A. A. Milne, illustration by E. H. Shepard

May 2026 daily stitching

We’ve already got one foot in June, but here’s how May shaped up:

Thirty-one handfuls of time, caught and stitched down before they could get away.

Some of the May stitching is in my YouTube May playlist, including the little wreath for May Day:

The little tree is also on YouTube and is quite easy to stitch.

The last week in May was too hot. I am a creature of the cold and dark, and I struggle with anything above 22 degrees. Thankfully it’s a little more normal this week and we have some very welcome rain in the forecast.

We like to see the other side, right? Always.

And June is carrying us along:

It’s unstoppable. The best option is to keep going, one day at a time.

Now playing

If you read the comments section of my last post, you will have seen the dilemma of having miniature vinyl LPs with nothing to play them on.

Had to remedy that, of course.

I had a look online for vintage portable record players – actually I used to have one very similar myself, it went to university with me in the olden days when there were few other ways of listening to music.

And after a few days of creative play and problem solving, here it is:

1:12th scale vintage record player

The album covers and records are from Easy Doll Home but everything else is all my own work.

The record player is made from thin sheets of bass wood, card, and painted grey board, with a fraction of pin for a stylus. At one point I thought it was finished and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Then I woke up at 3am thinking ‘It needs a flex and a three-pin plug! It won’t work without a plug! How am I going to do that?’

Turns out a vintage flex is quite straightforward – perle 3 embroidery thread with a bit of white glue swiped along the length to stiffen it a bit – and you can carve a plug out of layered grey board. Superglue three little lengths of brass pin into it and there it is.

I should have plugged it in to a tiny socket for the video but I think we can probably suspend disbelief for a few seconds.

This week, surrounded by tiny things, has been just what I needed. We currently have a long weekend here in the UK, so I’m not back to work until Tuesday. A bit more time out is no bad thing.

Normal services will be resumed at the end of May with some stitching. Until then, enjoy your weekend. I need to go and paint that little table you can see in the photos.

Shrinking

Sometimes life feels too big, and on these occasions I like to focus on something very small, and something completely different from stitching or mixed media art. Something that’s just for me and nothing to do with work or accomplishing anything.

You may remember the little twelfth-scale Sid Cooke shop kit I started last year.

The interior (about 10″ square) is decorated but needs furnishing in a more sensible way than this:

I’ve been having a little play with some of the tiny things.

I made the shop counter out of scraps of wood and some recycled perspex packaging. The front comes off for access to the ‘glass’ shelf.

Some decades ago I had a past life as a miniaturist, and these days it’s quite a challenge for the ageing eyes. A challenge in a good way though. Sometimes I wonder if the tiny world gives me a sense of control that the real full-size world can’t.

Whatever it is, I find myself retreating into smallness at the moment and feeling better for it. And in any case, all work and no play, etc etc.

I hope you’re making time to connect with the little things that make you happy too.

New PDFs for daily stitching

After a few weeks of very enjoyable drawing and writing, the new PDFs are out. I *think* they’re ok but let me know if you find any glaring errors and I will fire the proofreader (that’s me).

These PDFs are meant to give a little help and direction with daily stitching on the days when you hit a wall and can’t get started.

There are currently four PDFs to choose from, sixty little design sketches in each volume: Lines, Circles, Nature, and Scatter patterns, with brief stitching directions for each sketch.

Volume 3, Nature (mostly flowers and leaves)

There’s also a blank page in each volume for you to jot down your own designs, and once you get started you will find yourself coming up with many more ideas of your own.

The PDFs assume that you are familiar with, and able to execute, some basic stitch types. My online class, Intuitive Daily Stitching, goes through these stitches in some detail and suggests various ways in which you can be creative with some simple stitches. Alternatively, you can consult one of the many embroidery reference books or free online tutorials for help learning some simple stitches.

Occasionally people have trouble accessing the download, so there’s now a ‘Help with PDFs’ page in the shop header with the following diagram and instructions:

The cover photos show samples of some of the designs so that you can see how they might look in real life. Be as creative as you like with colours and thread types.

I really enjoyed putting these together, and I hope you find them helpful. Have a fabulous week.

April 2026

And that was April.

As always, nowhere near long enough.

The colour palette is starting to warm up as the days get longer and sunnier. April has been very dry so far and the garden needs rain.

Today sees the top third of my cloth full: four months of this year vanished and yet still present.

Tomorrow, onwards.

Behind the scenes

There hasn’t been much happening front of house for a couple of weeks because I’ve been busy back stage working on some new PDFs. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you might have seen a preview of this in my video earlier this week.

I’ve had a lot of messages and social media comments this year from daily stitchers asking for more direction on what to stitch. With over four years of daily stitching behind me, I have more than enough to share.

So I’ve spent the last few weeks developing four themed PDFs, 60 designs in each:

lines/bands/stripes

circles/spirals/swirls

flowers and foliage

little/scatter patterns

I need to work up some more samples for the front covers and find another couple of pages-worth of designs, but I think I’m nearer the end than the beginning.

I’ve had requests for a book rather than PDFs, but there’s no way I have the head space to tackle a book right now. Books can take months, often years, to get from idea to publication; I hope there will be one at some point in the future though. In the meantime PDFs are relatively simple to make, and much easier to distribute.

Also, and this has made me do the hollow gallows laugh, a couple of friends suggested the PDF thing after I’d already started quietly working on it. Responding ‘you’re never going to believe this but…’ is hardly ever convincing but I think I got away with it.

Anyway, for now – more proof-reading/editing, a little more drawing, and some quiet stitching. It’s been really enjoyable rediscovering some previous designs and working them up into samples.

I hope you’re enjoying your creative stitching too.

Have a lovely weekend.

Karen Turner Stitching Life

Threads of life

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June 2026 daily stitching

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Delays

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Quilter-couching

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May 2026 daily stitching

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Now playing

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Shrinking

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New PDFs for daily stitching

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April 2026

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Behind the scenes

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