Category: teaching

New online course

It’s been a hectic few weeks, and another very steep learning curve, but my new online course is out now. All lessons are pre-recorded, so you can learn in your own time and at your own pace, and you get lifetime access once you’ve enrolled. You can watch the introductory video and read the notes for free.

In this course you learn how to paint your own fabrics – I show you some basic techniques and then away you go:

Painting fabric scraps with Dye-Na-Flow fabric paints

You learn to plan and develop your ideas in a sketchbook using some easy drawing, painting and collage techniques:

Sketchbook pages using drawing, painting and collage techniques

And you learn to layer and stitch fabrics to a foundation to create a unique little landscape. I show you how to stitch distant trees and hedges, how to add a sense of perspective to your picture plane, how to add buildings, structures, fences, and paths, and finally how to add foreground details using some simple hand embroidery stitches:

Little landscapes and how to make them into cards

The videos are very informal and are intended to look as if you’re in the room with me. Occasionally I dither about whether to move a scrap of fabric or paper up or down by a few millimetres, but feel free to fast-forward through the less engaging bits – and my video-editing skills are minimal, as you will see. However, I think it’s probably as good as it’s going to get, and I think it’s good enough for you to learn the skills I’m setting out to share.

I think there’s somewhere over three hours of video in total, and each lesson has written notes beneath the video section, so you’ll need to scroll down each lesson to see all the information. There aren’t any subtitles for this course, but the written notes and the video together should be enough for you to understand what to do.

I’ve also made up some little fabric packs in the shop here (undyed fabrics for you to paint yourself) and here (hand-dyed sheer, semi-sheer, and textured fabric scraps for layering).

Stitch a Little Landscape fabric scraps collection

I think the customary way to introduce a new thing like this is for me to say something like, ‘I’m super-excited to share details of my new online course…’

The reality is that middle-aged British people rarely get super-excited about anything, and frankly it feels terrifying, rather than exciting, to put this much of myself out there. But – well – feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Every day a new adventure, and every day a little braver.

Journal to Book

A few people have asked how I’ve made this year’s long strip of daily stitching into a book. If you do an internet search for concertina-style books you will see that it’s quite an easy technique to adapt for cloth.

This is the process I’m using for turning my daily stitching, on a long strip of vintage bed sheet, into a cloth book.

You will need to make some sort of cover for your book, which will consist of a front cover, a spine, and a back cover – this can be all one piece, as mine is, or you can piece fabrics together so that the spine is a different colour. The cover needs to be a tiny bit bigger (a few millimetres, or a quarter of an inch or so) than your stitch journal pages.

2023 daily stitching, linen cover with simple running stitch
2023 daily stitching, inside back cover

To determine the width of the spine, you will need to fold your stitch journal cloth strip, concertina-style, back and forth, into as many pages as you want to have, and then measure the height of your folded stack. The diagram below shows roughly how the construction will work.

(very rough) diagram showing cover construction and page folds

The height of the folded stack will tell you how wide the spine of the cover needs to be. The spine of my cover is about an inch wide. The first and last pages will be stitched to the inside front and back covers, the valley folds will be stitched to the spine of the cover, and the mountain folds will form the outer edges of the double-sided pages.

Once your cover is constructed, you can start to stitch your completed pages down. It’s possible to stitch all the pages down right away, but I prefer to wait until they’re finished because once they’re attached to the spine, you won’t be able to get at them so easily.

page ready to be stitched down

You can mark the inside of the spine, dividing it into six (this is the number of times you will attach a valley fold) so that you have guidelines for where to stitch the page down. You will basically be sewing every other page to the cover. A running stitch is fine, but you could also backstitch.

marking page divisions on the inside spine of the cover

I use perle 12 cotton thread for stitching the pages to the spine, but any good strong sewing thread would be fine. Here’s the process in action:

stitching a page to the cover

Hope this helps.

Creating darkness (and a free sleep mask pattern)

I mentioned last week that I struggle to get enough sleep in the summer because of the increased amount of light. It doesn’t get properly dark again until August in this part of the world. Night time in June and July is just perpetual twilight, and I need night to be dark. Prolonged lack of sleep makes me as cranky, irritable, and plain exhausted as anyone else, so I thought I’d try a sleep mask as suggested in a comment. I ended up with this:

padded sleep mask, with depressions for eyes and nose bridge

It was actually quite effective, if a bit weird-looking.

BUT I don’t like it. Textiley people are often very particular about the texture and quality of fabrics, and I just don’t like the feel of this. It’s made from some sort of polyester-neoprene-type stretchy fabric, and the synthetic foam padding on the face side has a very strong smell that washing and airing outside hasn’t eliminated. The strap is also quite cumbersome and the slider clip thing gets stuck in your hair.

So while the principle worked ok, I wondered if I could make something that would be any nicer. I drew round the mask and adjusted the shape slightly, and made a pattern for the padded bit that fits over your eyes. I wanted to make it in a nicer fabric and chose some silk twill in a very dark midnight blue, with silk wadding for the padded bits. Incidentally, this table top ironing board is fabulous – it has little legs that fold out so it stands about 3″ high and the board is about half the size of a normal ironing board – it’s really useful (and no, I’m not on commission or in collaboration with ironing board companies! I found it in the supermarket while doing the weekly food shop. Imagine my excitement).

silk twill, table top ironing board

I used felt as a base on the front and back for stability and structure, and also for blocking out light. Woven fabric will always let some light in through its weave. I figured out a way of attaching the padding – I just stitched it down around all the edges to hold it in place so it didn’t shift around.

face-side sleep mask with silk wadding

When I had the two halves constructed I could attach some elastic (no clips!) to the side edges. I just backstitched up and down the short edge so that the elastic is attached securely.

sleep mask front and back in progress; silk twill, stitched with fine silk thread
half sleep mask showing clipped edges and elastic ready to be attached

And then it was just a matter of stitching the two sides together, with the elastic in between, which I did just by oversewing with wrong sides together. You could use narrow bias binding for a neater edge, I guess, or you could sew them right sides together and leave an opening to turn through. This way was good enough for me.

oversewing the two halves together

Finally I added a more decorative top stitch in a contrasting thread around the edges. And there, after a couple of hours or so, is a nice silk sleep mask – very lightweight, very comfortable, no plastic or polyester, no weird smell – and it delivered a pretty good night’s sleep too.

silk sleep mask

If you want to make one too, I’ve added a free PDF pattern download here:

Padded-sleep-maskDownload

Teachable

Good morning, and thank you so much to everyone who has signed up so far for my online course, Intuitive Daily Stitching. I hope you’re enjoying it.

Some aspects of the platform, Teachable, can be difficult to navigate. I’m hoping here to try and clarify the process a bit for anyone who’s had some trouble accessing the course.

Part of the confusion I think might come from the fact that a Teachable account and a School account are two different things. When you purchase my course, you’re automatically signed up for my School, which may be a different login from any existing Teachable account you may have.

If you have an existing Teachable account, I *think* (if I’m understanding this correctly) you can edit your profile in the top right of your screen to merge your Teachable Schools. If you haven’t got an existing Teachable account, then it’s a bit less complicated.

When you purchase the course, you should receive an email like this:

If you have at the same time created a new account, you may also receive an email like this:

When you have clicked on the ‘confirm email’ button, you will get another email like this:

You may then need to log in again before you can see your home page on Teachable. The first thing you should see on your page might look like this:

Suggest you bookmark this page so you can find it again

If you’re having trouble seeing anything at all, try clicking on my profile image (the moon, top left). You should be able to see your course in the ‘my products’ page in the menu top right. You may well have to log in again. Your ‘my products’ page should look something like this:

You can access Teachable’s student help pages here – scroll right down the page where there is some information on trouble shooting. If you’re still stuck, contact me and I’ll see if I can help.

Also, an update today – Intuitive Daily Stitching is now available with (English) subtitles for each lesson. It’s exactly the same content as the original version, just with subtitles on all the videos. If you’ve already purchased the standard version but would prefer the subtitled version, contact me and I can add you to the new course. Don’t pay twice!

Intuitive Daily Stitching with (English) subtitles

This is probably one of the least interesting blog posts I’ve ever written, but I hope at least someone has found it helpful. Let me know if you have any problems getting in to your course. Or if you previously had a problem and resolved it successfully, please tell me what you did. This has been (and still is) an immense learning curve for me too.

Online course: intuitive daily stitching

Well, here we are. After a good few weeks of hard labour and a very steep learning curve, it’s about as good as it’s going to be, and I think I’m ready to let it out into the world. Thank you for your patience while it was under construction.

The course is all pre-recorded, with no live element – so there’s no rush to sign up and no requirement to be available at set times. You can access the material as often as you want, whenever is convenient for you.

Online course via Teachable

The course is aimed primarily at beginners, so it may be helpful if you’re just starting out with some hand stitching, or some daily stitching. If you’re already stitching quite confidently, there probably won’t be much there that you don’t already know. You can watch the introduction without committing to a purchase, and that will give you an overview of the course content.

You can preview the introduction video here

Briefly, section 1 is about choosing suitable fabrics, needles and threads; section 2 focuses on a selection of easy hand embroidery stitches and various ways in which you can adapt them; and section 3 has some general information on how to approach hand stitching as a mindful, meditative practice.

Teachable landing page
Learn to make something like this

The course is quite informal in style and has me going ‘er’ and ‘um’ a bit, even with a script, but nothing is ever going to be perfect. I’ve tried to present it as if we’re in the same room, learning together.

If you don’t already have a Teachable login, you’ll need to create one (it’s free) in order to access the course.

Here’s a bit of the demonstration sampler that I’ve used to show you the stitches. I finished the sampler after recording the course – I just show you the basics in real time. You should be able to recognise the stitches I’ve added.

The price of the course is in GBP, because I’m in the UK. If you’re not in the UK, you can use any online currency converter to see the equivalent amount for you. The secure online checkout system will automatically convert the price to your local currency.

Please try and remember this converted amount so that you recognise it when it appears on your bank statement later. If you don’t recognise the amount and flag it as fraud with your bank by mistake, that can cause extra work and expense for me. Thank you.

Selection of worksheets accompanying each stitch lesson

And after all that preliminary waffle, you can find the course here

I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Vertical learning curve

I feel as if I’ve climbed a mountain today. I’m making a start on this, my first online class for absolute beginners:

Online course for beginners

I’ve learned many things already, one of which is that I’m pretty rubbish at keeping my hands in the frame when taking a video of myself stitching.

Summary

But perseverance is a virtue, so I will keep at it. It will be ok in the end, whenever that turns out to be…

Benefits of hand embroidery

Inventing stitches

If you do a lot of hand stitching, you can’t help inventing new stitch variations occasionally. There are lots of variations on basic stitches, and many ways to combine one basic stitch with another.

Blanket stitch tree with interlaced blanket stitch border

Here’s an interlaced/woven running stitch/blanket stitch combination, which looks best in two colours:

Sound on: Lovely Day, Bill Withers

You need to work a row of running stitch first, keeping the stitch and space between stitches as even as you can. Then you can work a blanket stitch into the gap, using a different colour, and weave through the running stitch to start the next blanket stitch.

Interlaced blanket/running stitch

A simple enough idea, and easy to stitch. It probably needs a better name though, combining blanket and running. Blanning stitch. Runket stitch. Oh dear me, no. Suggestions on a postcard please.

A little loopy

I thought I’d invented a pretty loop stitch the other day, but apparently it already exists.

Interlaced running stitch, discovered by accident

It’s basically pekinese stitch but with the thread looped around running stitches rather than back stitches.

The long cloth in the video and below has been in progress for a while, just somewhere to collect stray stitches and orphan fabric scraps when I remember to catch them.

Home for waifs and strays

Traveller’s blanket

I’ve finally made a start on my traveller’s blanket for the last ever class with Dijanne Cevaal. It took a while to think about the right foundation for this quilt, and in the end I decided on a piece of tea-dyed silk noil. Soft but textured, lightweight but warm. The back is hand-dyed silk noil, and the middle layer is brushed cotton (also known as cotton flannel).

A slight stumbling block in the thinking process for this quilt has been that traditionally these quilts have been all about travel and recording experiences, and I’m probably the world’s worst traveller. I’ve never ventured beyond the UK, never been on an aeroplane, and have never had a passport. I don’t even drive. I get seasick just watching boats on TV. What could I possibly have to say about travel?

And then I thought of course we’re all travelling constantly – through time, through life, through experiences. And so my blanket has ended up being about a journey through winter, my favourite season, which will be with us very soon. I’m thinking greys, dark blues, sludgy/grey greens, browns, whites.

I’m starting in the centre with this beautiful piece of antique embroidered cutwork, a mystery object. Does anyone know what this would have been, originally? It seems to be a discrete piece, and doesn’t look as if it’s ever been part of anything else – at first I thought cuff, but it’s not long enough, and there is no evidence of unpicked seams. It’s about 2.25” x 6”. Dressing table mat? Answers on a postcard please.

The beginning. A very pretty start.

I’m using a few fabrics expertly eco-printed by Jane Hunter together with some vintage and antique pieces that I’ve been saving for something special.

Collecting treasures – eco-printed silks by Jane Hunter, fragments from an antique silk christening dress, various vintage cottons and scraps

And in the blue and grey corner:

More eco-prints, new and old silk and cotton

This is going to be really enjoyable, I think.

Laying out and looking

Heart of Soil sketchbook

Settle down with a cup of tea or something because there are lots of pictures today.

You might recall I enrolled on the Heart of Soil online workshop last month – you can see my earlier post about it here. I collected all the lessons into a little sketchbook, and it’s been a lot of fun to revisit some techniques I haven’t used for a while. I particularly liked the limited colour palette – just blues and yellows – and the pages in the resulting book are nicely coordinated.

Front cover with strip of hand dyed silk wrapped around
Front and back covers
String of Hearts class taught by Tiffany Sharpe
Bluebird of Peace class taught by Megan Quinlan (mine is a blue tit, since I think that’s the closest thing we have to a bluebird in the UK)
Buds class taught by Michelle Schratz

I went a bit off-piste with some of these and added some lines from a vintage poetry anthology to some of the pages, and I added a teabag pocket to this one too. I made a stencil from Tyvek for the background leaf and flower images.

The lines of poetry on the page below are from a Rupert Brooke poem, mixed up to create a found poem.

Pebbles and Peace classes taught by Leaca Young
Paper doll class (I adapted this one a fair bit just to get it on the page) taught by Kim Smith (@slaphappystudios on Instagram) and painted watercolour tubes class taught by Kelly Hoernig (@kellyhoernig.artist on Instagram)
Watercolour wildflower garden class taught by Tracey Wozniak
Watercolour/mixed media backgrounds and mark making class taught by DeeDee Catron
The one-page journal technique, shared by Kiala Givehand (@kialagives on Instagram) and a sunflower for Ukraine taught by Lorraine Bell (@lorraine_bell on Instagram)

Of course the sketchbook itself is based on the one-page sketchbook technique (you fold a single sheet of paper, cut it strategically and fold it into an eight-page booklet) but I thought it would be fun to make a tiny sketchbook to tuck inside the bigger one. The smaller version is made from a sheet of A4 paper; just me enjoying myself, really.

Collaged pages in mini-sketchbook with various marks and papers
Pages from mini-sketchbook, collaged and painted, with lines from a vintage poetry anthology

I thought it might be fun to include a little video run-through but then I noticed the colour of my hands and thought I ought to explain. I did some dyeing this morning and – I do it every time – forgot to put the gloves back on when rinsing. My hands are not normally purple, just in case anyone is worried.

A very happy collection of classes and I enjoyed them immensely. Next up, I’m doing the Traveller Blanket course with the lovely Dijanne Cevaal and am looking forward to that. Next year I hope to be teaching online classes myself, and I’ve figured that the best way to see what works is to sign up for a few myself. And of course there is always something new to learn.

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