Month: May 2025

May 2025

And that was May.

May, stitch journal

May always feels like quite a long month to me, but not this year. The days continue to fly by and even though the days are getting longer here in the northern hemisphere, there never seem to be enough hours.

All of May

As always, a few stitches every day.

end of May

It’s been mostly winding/processing thread (and orders, thank you) and checking in with the various Making Zen groups and posts this month. Next month I hope to make a little time just for me.

May, stitch journal, detail

Of course we can’t ‘make’ time. It’s all the same time. The same twenty-four hours in every day, perpetual motion as the minutes pass and the world turns.

May, stitch journal, detail

It’s very easy to get caught up in the minutiae of daily life, and sitting with needle and thread for a few minutes every day is very calming.

May, stitch journal, detail

I calculated that it’s 1,247 days since I started this practice. I guess that’s a lot of stitching.

May, stitch journal, detail

I sometimes wonder where these annual stitch calendars will end up. I was half-joking when I said in my Making Zen chat with Kate that I might exhibit them when I’ve got ten years’ worth. Only another six and a half years to go, if that turns out to be a thing.

May, stitch journal, detail

The other side is important too: the side we don’t see, the side that forms the foundation and stability for daily work. The side that shows where you went and how you got there. It doesn’t need to be tidy or neat. Beneath the surface I suspect we’re all a fairly chaotic jumble of thoughts and feelings. It’s a kind of map, I guess. I think of these things as maps of time.

The other side of May

Looking forward to meeting June tomorrow:

June ahead

A warm welcome to all of you who are new to the blog as a result of Making Zen. Nothing much happens here, but if you enjoy a few quiet moments now and again then you’re probably in the right place. If you’re thinking of beginning your own daily stitching journey, please do take a look at my online class Intuitive Daily Stitching. Learn at your own pace, and watch as many times as you like.

And if you enjoyed my Making Zen workshop, you can take those ideas and techniques a bit further with my Stitched Samples for Sketchbooks course.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend.

Making Zen workshop

Just a quick fly-through to remind you that my free Making Zen workshop is available for 24 hours today. Depending on your time zone, you may need to wait for it to become available.

Making Zen workshop

If you want to watch this (and the other 30+ workshops) in your own time, and if you want access to the inspirational artist free gifts, then you’ll need to upgrade to the VIP pass, which you can do here. It’s absolutely worth having, if you can – the value of the free gifts alone is over $3,300, and you get ongoing access to everything.

Making Zen workshop

For transparency, upgrading to the VIP pass from the links on this page allows me to receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you) that helps to support my work as an independent artist.

Thank you, and enjoy!

Making Zen retreat

If you’ve got the free ticket, the Making Zen retreat starts today!

With the free ticket, my workshop will be available for 24 hours tomorrow (Tuesday 27th May), so don’t miss it 🙂

My zero waste stitching workshop for Making Zen

If you have the VIP pass, then you can watch the workshops whenever and however often you like, AND you get access to all the very generous free gifts on offer from the participating artists.

If you enjoy my Making Zen workshop, then you might like to develop these ideas and skills further with my online course, Stitched Samples for Sketchbooks, which you can find here.

Stitched Samples for Sketchbooks
Stitched Samples for Sketchbooks

And if you’re still waiting for thread – the wait is almost over, I promise. I decided it made sense to hang back until after the bank holiday weekend, since I can’t post anything until after then anyway.

Enjoy Making Zen!

Thread

It’s been a busy couple of weeks: over 950 skeins of thread, wound and labelled and coming soon. Soon-ish. I’ve just got to list and describe a couple more batches, then I’ll take a couple of days off, and after that they’re all yours.

I picked out some of my favourites – I call it dyer’s perks. Hank ends, oddments and leftovers, and all mine. I wind any skeins that are for me onto rolls of paper to keep them reasonably neat.

threads coming soon

These are some of the thread taster sets:

delicious!

Be patient. Not much longer to wait, maybe a week or so.

In the meantime, we’re getting closer to the fabulous Making Zen stitching retreat week, which starts a week today.

join me and 31 amazing artists from 26th May

It’s not too late to get your free ticket:

get your Making Zen ticket here

The free ticket gives you access to the workshops for 24 hours on the day they’re released. Upgrading to the VIP pass gives you lifetime access to all workshops AND you also get the free extras that participating artists are generously sharing. If you bought your early bird VIP pass then I hope you’re enjoying your exclusive early access to all the amazing workshops and free gifts.

For transparency, buying your VIP pass from the links on this page will result in my earning a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps enormously to support my work as an independent artist. Thank you so much.

And a reminder that you can watch my Making Zen interview with Kate here

Watch here

Happy Monday!

YouTube – out now

Amid all the thread winding I’m just dropping in to let you know that my recorded interview with the lovely Kate Ward of Making Zen is now available to watch on YouTube here.

Kate and me on YouTube

It was a joy to chat with Kate about daily stitching, mark-making, time and other things, and I hope you enjoy watching it. Please do give it a thumbs up on Kate’s YouTube channel if you liked it.

In the meantime if you haven’t got your Making Zen ticket yet, you can still get it here. Upgrading to the VIP pass will let you access the workshops two weeks early, from 15th May.

zero-waste stitched samples

The VIP pass gives you full access to all the workshops plus some very generous free gifts from 32 participating artists. For transparency, I am awarded a small commission (at no extra cost to you) when you purchase your ticket from the links on this page, so you will be helping to support my work as an independent artist. Thank you so much.

get your making zen ticket here

You know, middle-aged English people rarely get truly excited about anything, but I am genuinely very excited to be taking part in Making Zen this month and I’m looking forward to sharing some of my favourite techniques with you.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!

Shop News

I’ve been busy producing this over the last couple of days:

hand-dyed threads and fabrics

It will take me a while to sort and wind the thread, as each skein has to be made by hand on this rather Heath Robinson contraption:

Patent thread winder

It’s basically an upended chair with a yarn swift fixed onto the seat, from which I can unwind a skein from the hank onto a niddy noddy (and the autocorrect wanted to change that to giddy body, which made me laugh). A niddy noddy is a hand-held frame that allows you to wind a set number of yards of thread into a skein. A somewhat ridiculous name, in my view, for a very useful gadget.

In the meantime, the shop is open for the remains of the last batch of threads and fabrics. A few announcements:

  1. The global price of silk and cotton has completely sky rocketed and I have no choice but to increase my prices when the new batch is listed. I’ve managed to keep prices the same for a couple of years now so an increase is probably overdue. The existing threads in the shop are still at the old prices, so last chance to buy at this price.
  2. Silk perle 3, extra-fine silk, and extra-fine cotton will all be discontinued when current stocks have gone. Silk boucle is currently under consideration but if I can no longer buy it at a reasonable price then that may well be up for the chop too. I haven’t dyed any more silk boucle in this batch, so what’s in the shop is all there is for now.
  3. SLLD and SLLU fabric packs will be discontinued when current stocks are exhausted. Commercial fabrics have increased in price as well, and I have to buy the fabrics for these packs at retail prices because I don’t have the means to store wholesale quantities. I’ll continue to offer general fabric scraps packs when I can, and these will probably have broadly similar content to the SLLD packs.
  4. I am sorry that I am currently unable to post items to Northern Ireland or Europe.
fabrics for ironing and sorting into packs

I don’t know how long it will take to get these fabrics and threads processed, but I would estimate they could be ready somewhere towards the end of the month.

Have a wonderful weekend while I attempt to find a way up the thread mountain. The colour-coded tags that you can see in the picture, by the way, are knitting markers and they’re there to tell me what kind of thread it is. It can be hard to tell what’s what when it comes out a different colour but these make it easy to see at a glance.

thread mountain

PS – If you haven’t got your Making Zen ticket yet (you’ll need it if you want to access the free extras from me and 31 amazing artists at the end of May), then you can get it here:

get your Making zen ticket here