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.
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.
Hello, hope everyone had a good Easter break.
Some good news: there will be new threads in the shop later this week. 1,451 skeins of it, to be precise – yes, I counted – all wound and labelled by (my) hand.
At present when you visit the shop you will see all the thread listings are labelled ‘coming soon’ but that will change once the threads go live, probably midweek or so depending on how I get on. And I’ve just realised that midweek is tomorrow. The week has almost gone before it’s started.
Along with the good news, I’m afraid there’s some bad news. Royal Mail has increased their prices from today, and overseas shipping costs have increased by quite a lot. When I reviewed my shipping costs, I realised that I hadn’t been including the cost of packaging or the currency conversion fee, so in fact I’ve been undercharging for a few years on international postage. I’ve now rectified that, so you will notice the increase. As always, if the automated checkout overestimates your shipping cost, I will refund any overpayment. US customers, unfortunately your shipping is always going to be slightly higher than everyone else’s because it includes the 10% tariff.
It’s much more cost-effective to buy as much as you can at once, as you only pay the shipping cost once per order. Because postage costs are calculated by weight, up to 100g of thread costs the same to post as a single skein.
While we’re on the bad news I’m afraid there’s a bit more of it, for some. A few thread types are now discontinued so when the current batch is gone, they’re gone forever. The discontinued threads are fine cotton boucle, DMC stranded floss, and cotton perle 5.
Fabric packs are also discontinued and most are on sale, but there are still a few of those left so we’ll see how long they last.
Thank you, as always, for your kind support.
The sun is shining this morning, the buds are unfurling into new leaves, the birds are singing, and all is well.
Wishing everyone a lovely week ahead.