The entire month has passed in a blur of thread winding, dyeing, sorting and labelling, a task that is still very much ongoing.
But daily stitching counts the days and maps the path, creating lines of progress and marking the days in which standing still for a time becomes restorative.
January days
I’m loving this year’s template. I like the way every day is a slightly different shape, as they are in real life. Some days are short and fill up quickly; some days have awkward angles and sharp corners; some days feel a bit longer than they should.
January, detail
Looking back, I notice a lot of running stitch trundling along, charting a path and counting steps.
January detail
I think it’s probably my favourite stitch. It’s so versatile and can be very expressive. I like the way it moves forward one step at a time, putting one foot in front of the other just to keep going. I also like its simplicity and its capacity for trust. It doesn’t always know where it’s going but somehow it finds its way and ends up where it’s supposed to be.
I like the quietness of January, where nothing much happens. I enjoy the pale, muted colours of winter and the gentle light. I know some people don’t like the grey days and the long nights and are glad to see the back of it.
the back of January
Tomorrow is Imbolc, which marks the start of spring in the pagan calendar. It’s still cold, and the nights are still long, but you can see the light starting to change and there are snowdrops gamely battling on through the cold. Spring is on the way; you can smell it in the air.
In the meantime, I am still sorting through thread and fearing that I may never get to the end of it. But myself says keep calm and carry on and it will be done soon. If you’re waiting for thread, please keep an eye on the shop; all being well, the update will happen in a couple of days or so.
It’s Wednesday, which is my afternoon off, and I took a break from thread winding/labelling to attend to some – well – thread. Bit of a busman’s holiday perhaps, but my own thread storage system has been underperforming for a while and I do like to see things nicely organised.
Here’s my current purples collection:
purple threads
They’re all together, which is fine, but they’re all in different formats. Some are on paper wraps, some are on bits of drinking straw, some are on reels and spools, and when you’ve rummaged around in the box a few times they get hopelessly jumbled and it’s not easy to find anything.
I had this idea to make stackable trays that would fit inside the plastic boxes (the box is about 6″ x 9″ and 2″ deep) so that the paper rolls would be better contained and stay in roughly a single layer.
A sheet of craft card, a glue stick, and some measuring, folding, and cutting, and it’s working pretty well.
The tabs fold onto the side edges, and then the sides fold down over the glued tabs.
patent easy tray, white craft card
And here’s how the reds/oranges/yellows box is looking:
double decker thread storagestackable trays for thread
I do like it when an idea works. Wish me luck with the (much larger) box of browns, greys, and neutrals…
It will be the middle of next week before everything is washed, rinsed and dried, then it will take me a week or two to sort, label, rewind where necessary, photograph and list. I’m hoping to have them in the shop around the end of January, house move depending (yes, we’re still on the edge of our seats here waiting for dates).
There won’t be much else happening here while this is in progress so if I’m particularly quiet, I’m probably just up to my elbows in thread. And what better place to be?
In my bid to find some free time and a little head space, I’m ring-fencing Wednesday afternoons and blocking them out in the diary. This will be a few hours respite each week for me to do something just for fun, not for profit, absolutely non-business related, and purely for my own amusement. It’s intended to give me a bit of space so that I don’t feel ‘on’ all the time. Some weeks it might be for painting or drawing, some weeks it might be for making things, some weeks it might just be quiet reading time.
In a previous life, nearly thirty years ago, I began making 1/12th scale miniatures. Recently I’ve found myself wanting to return to making little things, and after our house move I’d like to create a twelfth-scale model of my new work room. A psychologist might suggest that immersing yourself in a tiny world over which you have complete control is a perfectly natural response to the uncertainties of real life. Maybe. I just really like tiny things.
I began this little enterprise over Christmas, when I took a week off. I began by having a go at recreating this real-life blanket box:
real life blanket box
Bought many years ago for my first home – originally cheap orange-pine veneer, which I collaged with some vintage magazine pages. I covered the top in thick foam and stapled the fabric on.
My first attempt at recreating it in 1/12th scale was ok but I thought the fabric could be better:
tiny blanket box with little magazines
For the first attempt above I coloured the fabric with felt tips, which turned out to be a bit too bright in this scale. I had another go, with watercolours and a finer fabric:
second attempt, better
The model blanket box holds fabrics, unlike its real-life counterpart:
that inner lid needs glueing down better!
And then I had a go at recreating my vintage 1960s sewing basket:
real life 1960s yellow sewing basket
And this is how that turned out:
1/12th scale sewing basket
I made the box itself out of cardboard, and created the wicker effect by glueing on a tiny piece of weaving with perle 12 cotton thread. I’ve painted the woven outer and lined the insides with yellow silk. The inner top is slightly padded, as with the real version. The handle is a pipe cleaner wrapped with perle 12 thread and poked through the sides so that it can swing up and down.
Yesterday I had a little play creating its contents.
1/12th sewing basket contents
I photographed some full-size needle packets and my tin of pins, then shrank the photos on Procreate to print them at scale. The little red pincushion is a scrap of dyed silk cocoon stuffed with a tiny ball of quilt batting. The tape measure is a bit of narrow silk ribbon, and the thread spools are just fine thread wound round short sections of cocktail sticks – technically slightly out of scale, but I don’t think it matters too much. The scissors and spectacles were bought years ago, carefully saved and put away after selling my dolls house in 2012. I’ve painted the spectacles silver (they were bright brassy gold) and I really need to figure out how to get lenses in them.
And then of course I needed my faithful birdie in miniature. I found a perfect tiny bird (made by Chik Sculptures on Etsy), painted it gold and added a tiny pincushion and googly eyes. Real life birdie is a little bemused, but it was such fun to make.
big bird, little bird
I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to recreate something in a smaller scale, using what I’ve got. After a little time out yesterday I’m also feeling suitably refreshed and ready to dive back into real life, which today means more thread winding. Enjoy the rest of your week and have a lovely weekend 🙂
I did have my new year fairly well planned out from January, but the delayed house move has caused a little disruption (and this is not a complaint, just a fact). So now my revised plans centre around Before house move and After house move.
The shop is nearly out of thread, so there’s something I can be getting on with Before house move..
cotton thread winding in progress
I wind every skein of thread by hand. Some threads come on cones, which are relatively easy to wind, and some come in large hanks, which have to be strung up on the skein winder. It takes a couple of weeks to wind a batch of assorted threads for dyeing, and then the dyeing/washing/rinsing/drying/sorting/labelling/photographing/listing takes another couple of weeks or so.
cotton and silk threads ready for winding
I’m a one-woman operation, so it does take a while. I really need to try and keep on top of it more this year.
silk and cotton threads wound into skeins
For After house move, I have lots of plans. I’d like to write a book proposal at some point, and I’d like to create another online course – I have a couple of ideas for that. I’d like to cultivate some sort of daily drawing/collage practice, just for my own development.
I also need to plan some free time into this year’s diary, which is something I overlooked last year. When thread and textiles are your hobby and your business, it can sometimes feel as if everything is work, because work expands to fill the available time. All work and no play is no good for anyone. So I’m cultivating a new spare time activity and am looking forward to spending a little time on something that is just for my own amusement. More on this later.
It takes time, I find, to get to know a new cloth before you can do the right thing for it. The new stitch journal for 2024 feels very different from the previous two years, despite being exactly the same vintage French linen. The main difference is its shape. It’s exactly the same size and scale – i.e. twelve A4 pages – but setting the monthly pages in a 3 x 4 grid formation is making it feel ‘bigger’ somehow.
Four days in January
As always, I don’t plan any day’s design in advance; it just happens in the moment. Sometimes that means unintentionally stitching something I end up not liking much. I’m not keen on the raincloud, for instance. The advantage of intuitive stitching is that it really doesn’t matter whether you like what you’ve stitched or not, nor does it matter if the stitches are wonky or irregular sizes. Some days it just is what it is. The point of it is to record time mindfully, so there’s no need to worry about how it turns out. And definitely no need to unpick.
3rd and 4th January
If you’re following my 2024 template, you can of course stitch the blocks in whatever order you choose. Personally I prefer each day to share a border with the previous and next blocks, so that they form a continuous stream of time.
I made a short video of yesterday’s stitch, weaving a new path between rows of herringbone stitch:
weaving between other stitches
And I’m also working on some other new beginnings, more of which later.
One day ends and a new one begins in the unbroken chain of time that makes up our life. It really doesn’t matter what day you begin this kind of practice; all the days join up regardless of the occasion.
1st January in progress
This year I’m using my 2024 template, which I’m imagining as a kind of map of the year. I sometimes think if life came with a map we’d probably all get to where we want to be a lot more efficiently. But I guess efficiency isn’t everything and I’m glad I ended up taking the long way round – the scenic route, I suppose we might call it.
As always, there is no plan apart from the template; each day will decide for itself what it wants to be. This practice, for me, has always been about witnessing the passage of time rather than marking events or occasions. I don’t often feel the need to remember what happened on a given day; it’s enough to know that I acknowledged the time passing.
I have no idea how this cloth will look by the end of December, but then I have no idea how my life will look by then either. It will be a voyage of discovery and an adventure as always.
a beginning
I’m using the same vintage metis (linen/cotton blend) as the last two years. You can often find this kind of fabric online by searching for vintage metis, or vintage French bed sheet. I’ve only just noticed that I’ve left it in its natural state, whereas last year I dipped it in tea to dull the whiteness a little. I’ve marked my outlines with plain old biro, because I know all the lines will be covered. If you’re stitching along and (for example) you want to leave gaps between the blocks, then you will want to use a less obtrusive method for marking out your daily sections.
To begin, I’ve done a very simple whipped running stitch in perle 12 cotton and silk, with a fine textured yarn couched around the edge, to suggest a ploughed field ready for sowing some seeds.
day one: running stitch in cotton, whipped with silk thread
I’m easing back into work-mode from tomorrow and will be thinking about all the seeds of ideas that might take root. I hope some wildflowers blow in as well.
