Category: In Between

Back to work

It wasn’t much of a week off in the end, because – surprise – this happened:

hand dyed threads drying in the sunshine

I just got lucky with the weather – decent light followed by a good drying day – so thought I would seize the day and all that. I’ll have a couple of easy days this week to make up for it.

I did manage to catch up with myself a bit on the other days. I got to the end of Tabula Rasa, and I’m not sure that’s its name any more but I’ve yet to think of a better one.

Tabula Rasa, the far end

I also enjoyed a little mixed media sketchbook exploration with some motifs based on the stitching.

circles
more circles

The thread will take a while to wind but in the meantime there is probably enough left in the shop to cover thread-based emergencies.

For various reasons, I’ve decided to streamline and simplify my shop contents. For the time being I won’t be making more fabric packs, so most remaining fabrics are currently in the shop on sale to clear. Prices have already been adjusted so you don’t need discount codes, and when they’re gone they’re gone so be quick if you’re interested. I hope you can find something lovely to add to your collection.

hand painted sheer fabric scraps for layering

Back to work after a holiday used to mean my apathetic return to the office where a thousand emails were waiting for me. These days back to work means winding beautiful thread by an open window listening to a robin singing in the garden. What luck. Hope your week is going well too.

Taking a short break

I’ll be taking a break soon so my online shop will close at lunchtime GMT (ish) on Wednesday 25th February and will reopen week commencing 9th March.

Teachable doesn’t seem to have a vacation mode, so that will remain open and accessible for online classes and PDF template downloads. If you need to contact me and it can’t wait a couple of weeks, please be patient because I won’t be checking emails every day.

There will probably be a daily stitching video on my YouTube channel tomorrow but after that I’m largely unplugging from social media for a week or so.

I’ll be having some quiet time at home, maybe working a bit on these:

Tabula Rasa, detail
Tabula Rasa, detail
unnamed quilt, in progress

Back in early March.

Studio time

My new year’s resolution to work smarter seems to be going well, and for the first time in years I find that I do in fact have some time for my own work as well as the business.

I did a little more on the winter sketchbook. It may be early spring, and the snowdrops are looking beautiful, but the weather is decidedly behind the curve so I feel justified in clinging to glorious cold winter for as long as I can.

winter sketchbook page with found poetry lines
winter sketchbook page
winter sketchbook page, mixed media collage
winter sketchbook page, handmade paper collage

I’m also trying to be a bit more organised about what goes where. My Ikea drawers are very slightly short of A4 size in the width, so I made some custom trays out of mount board and they fit nicely, two per drawer.

mark-making tools, rounded up and contained

The sides are covered with 2″ wide washi tape that I found hiding in another drawer. I should probably line the boxes to make them prettier but for now I’m happy enough with functional.

stencils and collagraphs all neat and tidy

And finally, I’ve resurrected a patchwork quilt top that’s had quite a few false starts.

quilt, take three or four

I had a look at it, wasn’t happy with it, and decided to unpick everything and start again. I wanted a fairly big circle on the surface and didn’t have a yarn that was anything like what I had in mind.

I’ve ended up stringing lots of thin threads together to create something like what I wanted. It’s a very fine silk noil yarn that dyed beautifully but is no good for stitching with – breaks too easily, too nobbly – but a few strands together are couching down quite nicely.

couching a bunch of fine threads

I’m wondering if maybe the whole thing will be couched rather than quilted. Always an adventure.

Hope your week is going well.

Wintering

I’m taking a break now for a week or two, to enjoy some rest and quiet reflective time.

daily stitching in progress

My shop is now closed for tangible items (thread and fabric scraps) but remains open for daily stitching templates. If you have a problem with a PDF download, then please do get in touch but please be patient as I will not be checking emails every day. My Teachable School also remains open and accessible throughout the festivities.

I’m preparing next year’s daily stitching by covering the grid lines, and it’s starting to look very inviting.

2026 preparations in progress

I’ll be back some time around new year with my completed stitching for 2025 and to begin again with 2026. It amazes me every new year’s eve how today turns into next year at the toll of a bell and an entire twelve months is suddenly behind us. Our human understanding of time is a strange thing.

Thank you for travelling through 2025 with me; I couldn’t make a living doing what I love without your kind support. Wishing you all the joy and peace of the season, and I’ll look forward to continuing next year.

Goals

I’ve been making a new planner for next year, trying to encourage myself to be more organised. Last year’s planner got more use than I expected, so I’ll keep it up through 2026.

Handmade book in progress

I use a cardboard template to draw each week-to-view page, and I stuck a bit of old ribbon to the spine to act as a bookmark.

2026 planner

I cheated with the cover and just changed the 5 to a 6

2026 planner cover

No need to reinvent the wheel or create extra work for myself.

It was a good opportunity to review this year’s goals, the ones I made in January:

2025 goals, made in the naive optimism of January

Well, let’s see how I did.

Don’t work at weekends: Fail. Pretty epic fail, in fact.

Don’t work past 7pm: ditto

Take 4 weeks holiday: Actually I almost made this one. Including the 10 days holiday I WILL take later this month, that will amount to about three and a half weeks for the year. Nearly.

Wednesday afternoons are for CPD (that’s a throwback from my corporate days, Continuing Professional Development) which essentially means throwing some paint/ink/thread around in order to learn something new: Managed that maybe a dozen times over the year at the most. Nowhere near enough.

End of year report: Must try harder!

On the plus side, I’m fairly sure I might win the annual Employee of the Year award. Only because my boss (that’s me) only has one of us to choose from (also me).

Next year I intend to make more use of my neglected YouTube channel, and I may well do more of what I’ve done today – daily stitching in real time, with running commentary.

You can see the making of this one here.

11th December, daily stitching

I have a few other goals in mind (as well as repeating those above that I didn’t quite get the hang of) which I’ll share in due course.

For now, I’m starting to wind down and will be officially on holiday from 17th December until about 29th-ish. I’ll be back next week with my last post before the festivities, and in the meantime I hope all your preparations for Christmas and beyond are going well.

Shop news

Just to say last orders for hand-dyed threads and fabric before Christmas is Tuesday 16th December, and that’s for UK orders only now as it’s unlikely that overseas orders will reach you before the festivities.

Silk thread sets

The shop will re-open for shippable items (hand-dyed fabric and thread) around January 5th. You can still purchase PDF downloads in the meantime. If you’re purchasing a PDF, the email containing the download link will go to the email address you used for the purchase, and that email may go to your spam/junk folder. Please save the download to your device before trying to print it as you may lose access to the link if you try to print it before saving.

I’ll be taking a break from 17th to 31st December, and may not respond to emails in my usual instant manner so please be patient if you have a question or problem with any purchases.

There isn’t much of the year left, and I can see the lower hem of my 2025 daily stitching scroll.

2025 daily stitching, nearly at the end

I’ll show the whole thing around new year, when I’ll also be starting my 2026 adventure.

2026 preparations

And finally, a reminder that you can now purchase pre-printed fabric for daily stitching via my shop on Spoonflower. Please read through the information on the blog page before purchasing.

Samples of pre-printed fabrics for daily stitching

When you buy from Spoonflower, 90% of your money goes to them. For transparency, I earn a 10% commission on each purchase, but I’m unable to help you with any questions or problems regarding your orders. For help with your printed fabric order please contact the Spoonflower help team and they should be able to assist.

Back later in the week with a little end-of-year reflection.

More thread

I have given myself too much to do, as usual. It started as an experiment to see whether I could produce enough hand-dyed thread to sustain a stand at Knit and Stitch in Harrogate next year. It was an idle thought, which I have tested and unfortunately found wanting. The crucial points I hadn’t factored in are that I only have one pair of hands, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day. I haven’t completely given up on the idea, but it will involve a little more rigorous planning and pacing if it’s going to work.

Hey ho. More thread for the shop, then, in the meantime.

There’s a big pile of hanks awaiting winding into skeins:

cotton and silk thread ready for winding

There’s a growing pile of threads that have been wound into skeins and are waiting for labels:

threads awaiting labelling

Apologies for the light, by the way – my north-facing room doesn’t get any sun, and the view from my window is mostly trees. Definitely not complaining about any of that, but the light is decidedly blueish at my desk at this time of year.

And finally there’s a smaller pile of threads being labelled:

labelled thread skeins

These are ‘spares’ that will go into Randoms, which will be in the shop (I hope) some time next month. I’m trialling a new labelling system which so far is working quite well. The swing tags get a bit cumbersome in a set of threads, and it can be fiddly to get them all to lie flat when packaging them for posting. These are smaller and flatter and I hope might work a bit better. I sourced some plastic-free sellotape so the labels and tape will be compostable.

I estimate there’s probably another hundred hours or so of winding/labelling/sorting into groups, so this will keep me busy for another couple of weeks at least.

I’ll be back at the end of the month with October’s daily stitching.

daily stitching, October so far

Good news

Good news if you’re in the US.

Royal Mail is now providing an international mail service that replaces the flat fee for US customers and instead charges the 10% tariff at the point of posting. What that means is that all charges and fees are paid up front before your parcel leaves the UK, leaving you nothing further to pay when your parcel is delivered. It also ensures that your parcel clears customs as smoothly as possible. Definitely no $80 fee.

Unfortunately I’ve had to increase the postage costs for US customers, to help cover the cost of the tariff as well as the administration fee that Royal Mail charges for providing the service.

There may be some delays to begin with, until the system becomes familiar and runs more smoothly, so you may want to wait a few weeks or so before placing an order – but you definitely can order again if you want to, and hurrah for that.

In other news, I’m preparing some new sheer fabric collections and have been painting some lovely chiffon and tulle fabrics.

painted chiffon
patterned tulle, painted and drying

I have some sheer silk fabrics to dye next week and then I’ll have some fun curating an inspirational collection for you.

We’re in for a wet and windy weekend here in the UK, so a comfy chair, a hot chocolate, and a good book may well be on the menu. And some quiet stitching, of course.

3rd October, daily stitching

Problem solving

I was a little disappointed to find that my new backpack doesn’t have a designated pen holder section. Lots of other very useful zipped pockets, but no pen pocket. And as someone who always has a pen about them, this was a bit of a problem.

Easy enough to fix, as it turned out.

DIY pen holder

A piece of mount board cut to fit the zipped section, covered with collage papers, a band of elastic stitched down across the middle and there it is. It fits into a zipped pocket perfectly and keeps pens and other drawing equipment nicely accessible.

pens in pocket

Problem solved. Hope your week is going well.

Production line

Having spent most of this week winding thread, I thought a behind-the-scenes glimpse might be interesting.

I dye thread in hanks, then wash and rinse it, letting it dry outside on a sunny day. When it’s all dry it comes in to be sorted into groups.

hand-dyed thread hanks, grouped by type

I then wind each hank into smaller skeins. Hanks will yield anything from four to ten skeins, depending on the thread type. Pictured below is a new fine cotton boucle yarn that I’m trying. I can no longer get the chunkier cotton boucle that I’ve had previously.

cotton boucle yarn, hanks into skeins

When each hank has been turned into skeins, each skein is twisted. This helps to prevent tangling and keeps them neat and easy to pack for shipping. I use a miniaturist’s drill with half a large paperclip glued where the drill bit should be.

twisted skeins

Then I label each skein with the thread type and yardage. I print, cut and hand write each label. Shown below is the new batch of silk perle 8.

labelling skeins

Once each batch has been labelled, the skeins are sorted by colour ready to be counted, numbered, named, photographed, described and listed in the shop.

skeins ready to be counted, numbered, and named

This entire process has to be repeated nine times, since I currently stock nine different types of thread (four silk and five cotton). I can only wind for half a day at a time, to avoid repetitive strain injury, so it does take a few weeks to get all of it into the shop.

The best bit about the whole process is that there is no waste. Any part-skeins go into Randoms, to be gathered into mini-collections, and anything shorter than a yard goes into the ends pot to be used as ties for tags or in daily stitching.

ends pot (left) and Randoms (right)

Did I say that was the best bit? I meant it’s the second-best bit. This is the best bit:

Mine! Dyers’ perks

I only take a few yards for myself, and only in the colours that really appeal to me. These threads are wrapped round paper tubes, made very simply by rolling a 3″ square piece of copy paper and cutting a little notch in one end.

So there it is – the process from start to end. Threads should be available from around mid-September, if all goes to plan. In the meantime there are still some very pretty threads in the shop here.

For me, back to the daily grind. I mean daily wind.