Karen

Shop news

A very happy thanksgiving to my friends and customers in the USA – I hope you’re all having a lovely time today.

I have a few updates to share:

Firstly: I’ve created a coupon giving 25% off all my Teachable courses (that’s courses only, not PDF downloads) for one week only, which you can get by entering the code BF2024 at the checkout. Be quick – it expires at midnight on 5th December (and I think that’s midnight US time but don’t leave it till the last minute just in case it turns out to be GMT).

I confess to some ambivalence about Black Friday deals and coupon codes. It all feels a bit gimmicky, and it feels as if people do it because everyone else does it. It’s frankly annoying when you’ve paid full price for something only to find it reduced a few days later, but that seems to be the nature of retail. I like to think my prices are already accessible for most budgets and that they already offer good value, but if a coupon code entices the undecided, then I’m happy. I can only keep the prices this low for a few days, so if you’ve been thinking of signing up for one of my courses, now is a good time.

You can sign up now and access it later; you get lifetime access to all lessons with no time limits. You can download the videos whenever you’re ready, and you can learn at your own pace as everything is pre-recorded.

My Teachable school is here and current courses are:

Intuitive Daily Stitching – two identical versions, one with (English) subtitles: a beginner’s guide to starting a simple daily stitching practice, including how to choose fabric, needles, and threads, and how to work a variety of basic stitches in a number of different ways.

Stitch a Little Landscape – no subtitles: includes a brief guide to painting your own fabric and thread, and instructions on how to layer and stitch scraps of fabric, adding details with hand embroidery to create a miniature textile landscape.

Creative English Paper-Pieced Patchwork – no subtitles: lots of content in this one – make a little patchwork box, practise piecing awkward shapes by making a patchwork sampler, and tips on starting a sketchbook practice and designing your own patchwork.

Secondly: My online shop will close for all physical orders (that’s anything that needs posting, so all fabrics and threads) on Friday 6th December. If you want thread or fabric in time for Christmas, now is the time. If you’re outside the UK and you leave it much later than 2nd December there are still no guarantees that your purchase will arrive before Christmas. I have five lovely sets of hand-dyed fine silk thread on sale at present; there are also the usual fabric scrap packs and various embroidery threads. I appreciate that I’m closing uncharitably early, but to me that’s better than having items go missing in the annual parcel scrum at the post office.

The shop will remain open throughout December for PDF downloads, which largely manage themselves. Contact me if you have any problems downloading or accessing anything.

Thirdly, and most happily, my new 2025 daily stitching template will be available from early December, for anyone who wants to stitch along next year.

I worked a little sample just to see how it would look. Next year I’m returning to the long thin format, but the monthly template cunningly tessellates on all sides, so you can join the monthly blocks together in whatever formation you like.

Apologies for a long and self-promotional sort of post. Blame the time of year. The post of (unpaid) Marketing Manager is still up for grabs, by the way, if anyone wants to work for nothing 🙂

Today’s daily stitching is a triangle, and it really is a triangular tricksy sort of day. A case of art imitating life if ever I saw one.

A quick quilt

This has been the week of New Kitchen, which I anticipated (correctly, as it happens) would be Quite Stressful.

I needed a little quilting/stitching task that wouldn’t take too much space, effort, or concentration, because of all the noise and disruption. Something that would keep me busy enough to be distracted but available enough to make regular cups of tea for the workers and be prevailed upon to make decisions etc.

This little chair has been in the conservatory over the summer. It’s pretty basic and uninspiring but has the advantage of folding out into an emergency bed should we ever need one. The conservatory is currently 2°C so we brought it into the house to prevent it getting too cold or damp. Due to lack of space it’s ended up in my work room, where it makes a very acceptable little reading chair. I may well keep it here.

This seemed like the week to make a more colourful covering for it. You can see I’ve started on the arms, just by wrapping some padded patchwork strips around them. They need the ends gathering and stitching to secure them better.

I was never going to completely reupholster the chair; it just needed something a bit more colourful as a throw.

I’d bought a few cotton fat quarters a while ago. I very rarely buy new fabric, but this was my consolation purchase for the disappointment of not being able to go to the Knitting and Stitching show in Harrogate this year because it was Kitchen Week. Somewhat incredibly, all nine fat quarters ended up sitting together quite happily. The fabrics are mostly Moda and Marcia Derse quilting cottons. The map fabric is Tim Holtz.

I didn’t paper-piece this one, of course, and you can see some little mis-matches here and there where my quarter-inch seams went a bit awry. Slightly imperfect, but it was just what I needed to see me through a fairly turbulent week.

Here’s how our kitchen looked on Monday, by the way:

It will be really lovely when it’s done. The upside is that there were a few meals out, so no cooking and no washing up. The kitchen should be finished next week, if all goes well, then it will need redecorating and new flooring. In the meantime it’s a case of keep calm and quilt.

Quilting time

You might remember this that began in June. It’s taken five months to put it together, in between other things, but it’s now one complete square, about 37″ or so.

removing the basting stitches – always the best job

I hadn’t originally envisaged ‘proper quilting’ it – as in backing, batting, and top, but somehow that just happened. Normally I would just have used a top and a backing. My batting of choice is Hobbs Heirloom wool, which is lightweight and very easy to quilt; I’ve never got on well with the cotton or polyester battings. The backing is cream cotton calico.

It’s very pale, and very neutral, and I’m currently undecided about whether that’s a good thing or a dull thing. It’s definitely quiet, and I like quiet. And it’s winter, which is a good time for quilts and quiet.

The circular outline (couched, black and cream silk bourette yarn) is a little thin, and the quilting so far is probably a little small.

But it’s a start. For now, it will rest on the chair while I look at it a bit more.

My problem generally, and this applies to painting as well as textile art, is that I usually like backgrounds as they are. I often have trouble adding the requisite focal point because I don’t want to obscure the background.

This little quilt has some really interesting patches, some of them made from layering sheer fabric over another, like this tea-dyed silk with a layer of dress net over the top:

And this vintage cotton with textured nylon chiffon over the top:

layered patch, cotton and spotted chiffon

I don’t want the quilting to trample all over the piecing and the more interesting patches, but I do need to quilt all the layers together securely. I may try tying the layers here and there. I think it just needs to sit on the chair for a bit while it thinks about what it needs (don’t we all!)

The sketchbook I’m plotting this (and others) in is an A4 landscape-format book, one of my favourite layouts.

Everything in this sketchbook is about remembering, recollecting, and forgetting. There are spots of time, there are ghosts (from time past), there are attempts to turn something intangible and unfathomable into something visual and tactile. There are shadows from time past, and there is the light of time present.

The thinking and the testing is all part of the finished thing.

Today I will be mostly looking at a small quilt as it rests on a chair. And yes, I call that work now. It’s ridiculous really.

Marking Time

This week saw the arrival of this lovely book by Tommye Scanlin all about the various ways fibre and textile artists mark the passage of time.

It’s absolutely full of wonderful textile art, and reading the artists’ statements has been inspiring and thought-provoking. It always amazes me how weaving can look like embroidery, patchwork, or even knitting, from a distance. It’s basically all magic with thread.

You know I don’t enjoy the whole self-publicity thing (the post of unpaid Marketing Manager is still up for grabs), but here’s my quiet corner of this lovely publication:

Towards the end of the book, Tommye writes about her own textile art practice. I really like the way she uses dice to randomly choose a shape and colour for her daily weaving, letting chance play a part in the work, as it does in life.

It’s a beautiful book that I’ll enjoy returning to again and again.

In other news, I’ve been adding some little landscapes to the shop:

Of course you can always learn to make your own little landscapes here. Just saying.

October

I say it every month but even with the extra hour from putting our clocks back last weekend, time is still flying by so quickly. It’s unstoppable, of course. Time is all we have, and it keeps on rolling. And time is what I’m trying to illustrate here. A map of time, moments in days, days in a life.

Today is Samhain, in the traditional pagan calendar the beginning of winter. The days are already short, and the nights are already dark. Some say the veil between the worlds is thinner today.

I know a lot of people don’t enjoy the dark days and nights, but I’ll take hats and scarves and boots over shorts and sandals any day. There’s a lot to look forward to: cosy evenings with good books, lamps and candles, warm quilts to wrap around chilly knees, hot soup, and (even better) hot chocolate. I sometimes wonder if the season of our birth somehow becomes our favourite time of year. Maybe having a winter birthday means I enjoy this time of year more than summer.

So far there have been falling leaves and blue-grey skies, and more to come.

As usual, keeping it simple. Little stitches marking the passage of time.

I don’t often use backstitch – I find it a bit finicky – but I do like this one, worked in a space-dyed silk perle 8 thread:

October stitch journal, detail, space-dyed silk thread

I like the other side even better. The other side of back-stitch is split stitch:

There isn’t much left of this year:

Stitch journal, looking ahead to November and December

I’m starting to think about next year’s template, of course. I only have enough of this lovely vintage linen for one more year. My remaining piece measures about 5 feet by about 3 feet, and I’m thinking about whether to make another large cloth, this time in a 3 x 4 formation, or whether to cut and join strips of it to make a long cloth.

What I’ve enjoyed most about this year’s template is the variety. I really like the way every day is a different size and shape, as they often are in reality, and the way the days fit so seamlessly together, also as they do in real life.

I’m finding myself repeatedly drawing a kind of wavy grid in my sketchbook work lately, and I’m thinking I might base my new template on something like that. The grid pattern makes me think of an enlarged photo showing the weave of a piece of gauzy fabric, like cheesecloth or scrim.

It’s very much a work in progress.

the last piece of vintage linen and the beginnings of a plan

At some point I will be ready for 2025, but not just yet.

book cover (3)

Anyone bored with sketchbook covers yet?

Look away now, if the answer is yes 😎

This one is A4 size, and it’s the sketchbook I’m using for the Laura Horn Modern Mixed Media course. So far the course content is quite different in style from what I would normally produce, but there are some interesting techniques that I might be able to adapt into some kind of landscape work. Laura is very, very good at what she does, and she demonstrates the techniques expertly.

The cover for this one is mostly layered sheer fabrics – hand-dyed silk organza, chiffon and nylon tulle, on a plain calico base. I drew some loose scribbly marks and lines on the calico first, which you can just about see under the surface, and then layered the sheers over the top to form a kind of landscape.

The scrap of poetry on the front cover, held in place under the top layer of nylon chiffon, is from ‘Home Thoughts in Laventie’ by Edward Wyndham Tennant.

The back is a little more simple, but broadly the same technique:

Sheer fabrics are notoriously difficult to photograph, so some of the colours are not quite right here – textiles always look so much better in person, in any case. This detail of the back cover shows some hand-painted builder’s scrim under the top layer of chiffon.

As usual, I’ve made a wrap-around slip cover, so the inside covers do double duty as pockets.

The Modern Mixed Media course so far has been quite heavily focused on ‘botanicals’, which I’ve struggled to render on paper without it looking like someone else’s work. The best I’ve been able to do so far is a kind of scribbly variation, which I quite like.

scribbly botanicals, pen and ink/watercolour

I’m not terrifically impressed by the paper in this sketchbook, which is a Fabriano watercolour 200 gsm. The paper has a very prominent texture, which I find distracting. You can see it particularly clearly on this page:

I’ve taken to collaging the pages before adding any paint, which I’m finding easier to handle.

sketchbook page, collaged with vintage papers

This page is ready for something, though I don’t know what yet. I could easily say the same about myself, most days. Let’s see what the rest of the week brings.

Book cover (2)

This week’s sketchbook cover almost made itself. I had a quarter yard of this glorious Marcia Derse ‘wabi sabi polka dot’ cotton quilting fabric that turned out to be exactly the right size for this one. When something is already the right size, I tend to take it as a sign that it was meant to be.

The light isn’t great here today, so the colours in the photos are a bit greyer than in real life.

Marcia Derse quilting cotton, wabi sabi polka dot

This sketchbook is quite big, with pages about 14″ x 11″ (roughly A3-ish). Unable to find what I wanted, I ended up making my own using some large sheets of 250 gsm mixed media paper and some very helpful online bookbinding tutorials. I even added header tape and a bookmark ribbon. The hard casing is just cardboard packaging covered with brown paper, which is why it needed a more decorative cover.

This book is for mixed media paint experiments, which I’d like to do more of when I manage to find the time.

All I did with the fabric was lay it on a calico backing to stabilise it and then outline each of the circular shapes with running stitch in a dark perle 12 cotton thread. I also added some straight stitches in very pale grey to the plain dark shapes along the spine.

It’s just a simple slip case, so it forms its own useful pockets in the front and back inner covers.

I’m not often attracted to something this bright, but I really like everything about this fabric – the varied mark-making behind the shapes, the painterly/collage style, the patterns in each circle and the colour palette. I wish I’d designed it.

I love being surprised by fabric. Looking forward to getting started in this one.

Book cover (1)

I’ve been having a tidy-up in my workroom and trying to round up All the Sketchbooks. Turns out there are a few more than I thought.

Some are complete, some are nearly complete, and some are completely empty. I do like a well-dressed sketchbook, so you know what’s going to happen next.

I have a little 6″ square Seawhite sketchbook (140 gsm cartridge paper) where I put paint scraps – leftover paint from another project, not enough for a new thing but too much to pour away. Then I go back in and add marks/other media, with no real plan. However hard I try to keep each sketchbook to a theme, they always end up being a fairly random collection of colours and marks.

The cover for this one is made from hand-dyed silk organza and dress net, roughly cut into circles and rings, layered onto some plain calico. Then I’ve covered it with very sheer nylon chiffon and stitched some simple lines and marks over the surface to hold it all together. I’m very bad at stitching text so I’ve sandwiched a small piece of handwritten card on the spine between the chiffon and some net.

mark-making sketchbook cover (front, detail)

mark-making sketchbook cover, in progress

If anyone’s interested in the contents, here are a few pages showing how simple it can be:

I recently got some Roman Szmal watercolours to try, just a starter set of five, and I really like the Caput Mortuum and Aquarius Green:

Roman Szmal caput mortuum and Aquarius green with fine black and white pens

Mostly this book (so far) consists of various rings and circles, hence the design on the cover.

watercolours with walnut ink, marks made with cotton bud (q-tip) and cocktail stick

watercolour with Derwent drawing pencils

There are lots more books needing covers, so there’s more than enough here to keep me busy over the coming months. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, do you have long/ongoing projects planned for the coming winter?

Sketchbook Revival

Quite a few links in this post; I hope they all work.

Firstly, a huge thank you to Fiona, who told me about the free online Sketchbook Revival course hosted by the wonderful Karen Abend. I’ve been following along, and it really has been an exciting and inspiring two weeks. If you missed it, I think the classes are still available for another couple of weeks or so. And another huge thank you must go to all the amazing artists who so generously shared their time, experience, and processes.

I kept a sketchbook (more of a notebook, really) to remind me of the content, and I had a go at most of the projects – some more successfully than others, but then you generally learn more from your ‘bad’ art. I stayed pretty close to the techniques and images presented, but made enough notes to be able to attempt something similar in my own style, and I think I’m still learning what that is. Shown here are just a few examples; this particular book is actually full-to-bursting now.

Sketchbook Revival 2024 notebook, front cover

I added pockets to the notebook so I can write extra notes to myself. I have a lot of sketchbooks, most of them constantly in progress and nowhere close to being finished, and I often struggle to find enough time to use them meaningfully.

As Karen Abend so wisely says in the last session, however passionate you might be about your creative practice, it can be very difficult to be consistent with it, and it’s true – life gets busy; often I don’t know what to do in the sketchbook so I end up not doing anything in it; and then there’s the potentially overwhelming problem of the inner critic and imposter syndrome. After these two weeks of brilliant classes, I’m more determined to maintain a daily sketchbook practice. There are lots of mixed media ideas I want to explore, and I can now promise myself that I will find the time for it.

inside back cover, pocket (envelope) for notes to self

Usually these days my drawing consists of abstract mark-making, and it’s been a while since I’ve drawn ‘things’ that can be recognised as themselves, although lately I do seem to be drawn to flowers and leaves. A few of the techniques demonstrated in the classes are somewhere between abstract and realistic. I really enjoyed this poppy meadow session, hosted by Tamara Laporte:

There was mark-making by Joy Ting, using twigs as drawing tools – I already do this quite often myself, and it’s been reassuring to see and hear artists voicing my own thoughts about processes, using similar techniques.

trees drawn with sticks dipped in walnut ink and acrylic ink

There was a bit of mixed media collage, with Lynissa Hayes:

And some proper drawing – upside-down thumbnails hosted by Linda Germain:

upside down thumbnails (left) and how to draw anything (right)

The right hand page shows the exercise presented by the utterly brilliant Suhita Shirodkar, who demonstrates how to tackle a complex street scene, featuring architecture and crowds, in pen and watercolour. This one was a bit out of my comfort zone – not something I would even think about drawing, usually – but she makes it very accessible and it was actually a lot of fun.

And then there were mixed media pockets and tip-ins (not a term I’ve come across before; from the context it seems to be an extra page that you stick into a journal or sketchbook) hosted by Roben-Marie Smith, and also really enjoyable.

And there was drawing over (and under) collage with Julie Fei Fan Balzer:

There’s a LOT more in the course than the handful of examples I’ve given here – there are more than thirty sessions altogether. I learned a lot, had lots of fun, and am immensely grateful to all the artists who took part in this.

Next up, I’m doing a mixed media class with Laura Horn, and am looking forward to getting stuck in. Maybe it’s something about the autumn that makes me want to go back to school. It’s probably all those Septembers as a child, with a pencil case full of new pens…

September

Immediately on writing today’s title I’ve given myself an Earth Wind and Fire ear worm (🎶 …ba-dee-ya, say do you remember, ba-dee-ya, dancin’ in September… 🎶) and now you have it too, I hope.

Aaanyway. It flew by, as usual.

I really like the variety of shapes on this year’s template. Originally it was meant to look like an aerial view of fields, but it’s probably turned out to be a bit too colourful for that. If anyone has restricted themselves to a brown/green palette throughout, they might be having more luck with the realism. I still like it as it is though.

I’ve used a variety of thicker yarns and threads for the borders (field boundaries, I call them) – mostly cotton and silk boucle, plus a few scraps of textured yarns that I’ve found in the threads box. For the one below, I used some viscose hollow ribbon (from Oliver Twists fibres) stuffed with yarn. It’s fairly easy to thread yarn through the hollow centre with a big blunt needle or a small safety pin. Once it’s stuffed, you can ruche the ribbon up a bit and it creates a lovely ruffled effect.

My favourite this month is probably this one, worked without any kind of plan, just meandering backstitch stems and detached chain stitch leaves, in hand-dyed silk perle 12:

The other side is a little quieter than the front, which is true for most of us, I think.

October tomorrow… and before we know it, it will be the end of another year. If you’re starting to think about (whisper it) _^Christmas there are threads available here.

I’m starting to think about next year’s template and so far am drawing a complete blank. I’ve enjoyed making the previous three, as a scroll, a cloth book, and a large cloth. I may well return to the long thin format as I really like the continuous stretch of days, long like a year, but I’ll give it some more thought.

Priority this week is to try and find someone who can fix our boiler because currently we have No Heating. Good job we have plenty of knitwear and quilts.

Author: Karen

Shop news

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A quick quilt

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Quilting time

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Marking Time

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October

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book cover (3)

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Book cover (2)

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Book cover (1)

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Sketchbook Revival

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September

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