teaching textile artist, stitching by hand, thread, embroidery, stitch journal

Make your own Sketchbook

My new mini-course on Teachable is now available here

Three very simple sketchbooks to make, plus lots of ideas and techniques on preparing and filling the pages with paint, collage, and simple mark-making.

My preference is always for making my own sketchbook rather than simply buying one. I often think bought sketchbooks have more pages than I can comfortably fill, and they also tend to get too full once you start sticking extra papers or stitched samples in them. If you make your own book, you can limit the number of pages from the beginning so that it’s not completely bursting at the seams when you’ve filled it.

The first book, the basic concertina/accordion fold book, is very simple – some might think simplistic, or a bit too simple – but I think it’s one of the most versatile fun little things you can create.

The zine-fold book – also very simple – is equally versatile, and offers lots of possibilities for some quick explorations.

The third book in this little mini-course is a single signature stitched book with a wrap-around cover with integral pockets.

single signature sketchbook with painted pages (step-by-step tutorials for this)

You get to see lots of pages from my own sketchbooks, and you get some collage paper to print and download, plus some tag templates and some poetry lines to cut up and re-assemble.

Special Early Bird price of £25.00, which will rise to £30.00 from 1st April. You don’t need to enter a code; just buy before the end of March for the lower price. It’s all pre-recorded, so you can start any time, download the lessons, watch as many times as you want for as long as you want. No time limits, no deadlines, just learn at your own pace.

It’s primarily aimed at beginners, but I’d like to think there’s something for most mixed media enthusiasts here.

This is the first in a series of short mixed media courses. Up next (and still working on it – for which read, ‘haven’t really started it yet’) will be paint your own collage papers plus mark-making tools and techniques for mixed media sketchbooks. That title might need some work, but I’m having lots of fun here this week. I hope you are too.

On tension

Not the everyday stress kind, but the tension in stitching. I’ve had a few messages recently from stitchers asking what kind of hoop or embroidery frame I use. If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know that I hardly ever use one at all.

I have a variety of frames, from the tubular/modular plastic kind to the traditional round wooden hoops, and I don’t get on with any of them well enough to use them regularly. I also don’t do ‘proper’ formal embroidery very often, the kind that needs stretching and framing. If I did, then I’d have to learn to stitch in a hoop more consistently.

If I do have to use a hoop, I prefer square/rectangular frames like these by Nurge (no affiliation, I just like them):

I prefer these because I never understand why most embroidery hoops are circular when the grain of fabric is square. With a round hoop, there’s always a danger of overstretching the bias into the frame and distorting the fabric.

Here are some of the reasons I don’t like using a hoop, and these of course are my personal preferences, not in any way an instruction not to use a hoop. Most stitchers seem to like them.

I don’t like the way you can only see a little section of the work when using a hoop. I like to see the bigger picture throughout. I find it hard to stay connected to the whole cloth when I can only see and handle a bit of it at a time
I don’t like the way the fabric is stretched taut (and I know you don’t have to have it drum tight). I prefer to feel the weight of the cloth in my hands as I stitch
I don’t like the way the edge of the frame crushes previous stitches when you move on to another area. If you’re working on something very textural or layered, it’s sometimes too bulky to fit in the hoop comfortably
Unless you have a hands-free frame on a stand (and they come with their own separate issues, in my experience), you have to reserve one hand for holding the frame and it becomes cumbersome
You can’t easily see what’s happening on the back of the work without turning the whole thing upside down

For informal embroidery, or general hand stitching like the daily stitch journal, I find it’s very easy to manage the tension without a hoop. Half the battle is having the right fabric: if your fabric is too lightweight or slippery, then (probably) hello Mr and Mrs Pucker. But then sometimes you might enjoy that effect, where the stitches pull slightly too tight and cause undulating ripples across the surface. If you’re working on medium weight cotton or linen, then it’s fairly easy to maintain an even tension.

Circles are probably the trickiest thing to stitch without a hoop, because it’s very easy to pull the thread fractionally too tight, and that will cause puckering. General good practice is to support the work on a table (sit upright, it’s good for your posture) so that you can hold the bit you’re working on as if your hands were the hoop. The rest of the cloth just relaxes on the table.

circles in progress

If you work slowly, you can check as you go that the fabric isn’t pulling under the stitches. You can use a thumb to press each stitch into the cloth, which also helps to check the tension. I sometimes get irate messages on Instagram saying ‘get your thumb out of the way, I can’t see the stitch’. The thumb is an essential piece of equipment if you don’t use a hoop. With practice, you can feel when the tension is right.

There’s a section on managing the tension in my Intuitive Daily Stitching course, which might be helpful to beginners.

So there we are. How many of you prefer to use a hoop?

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.

Creative English Paper-Piecing

After weeks and weeks of work, play, and production, I think my new course on English paper-pieced patchwork is about ready to be let loose.

There’s a free preview, so make sure you watch that before committing – just so you know what you’re letting yourself in for.

Mostly what you’re letting yourself in for is me trying (and occasionally failing) to keep my hands in shot where you can see them. I think it’s probably – mostly – good enough though.

Many people think English paper-piecing is hexagons. Not the way I do it. In fact there are no hexagons here, apart from a few accidental or antique ones.

So, what do we cover in this course?

We start with English paper piecing (EPP) for absolute beginners, where you get to make a little box like this out of simple squares:

Then we make a paper-piecing sampler where you can practise piecing triangles, curves, and irregular shapes:

We get creative with fabrics and paper:

And we do some colourful sketchbook work:

Before you know it, you’ll be branching out unaided and doing your own thing.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, we do a (pretty brisk) overview of making a patchwork cover for your sketchbook, we have a whistle-stop look at how quilt-as-you-go works, and we see how to turn a pretty square of patchwork into this:

Do I sound as if I’ve recently taken a course on Basic Marketing for the Self-Employed? I promise you I haven’t. But here’s the thing about being self-employed. You have to do All The Jobs, including all the marketing and self-promotion, which is my least favourite thing. My second least favourite thing, by the way, is video-editing – as you’ll see if you embark on the course. It’s all very informal, as usual.

OK, enough self-promotion and advertising.

In other news, I’m now setting about trying to restock the shop somewhat as all the fabrics are sold out. More on that later.

In the meantime did I mention that I have a new course out…?

😎

Promotion

One of the challenges of being self-employed is that you have to do All The Tasks, including the tasks you don’t enjoy much and the ones you aren’t very good at. In addition to that, the less creative tasks (admin, accounting, stock control etc) seem to take a disproportionate amount of time, leaving less available ‘creative’ time. It’s merely an observation, not a complaint; I’m very happy with where I am, but also I’m often surprised by how little time or space there seems to be for my own work to grow and develop.

For me one of the tasks on the ‘meh’-list is self-promotion and marketing, so when someone is kind enough to do this for me, it really makes my day.

Jen has very thoughtfully taken the time to produce a really lovely response to my Intuitive Daily Stitching course here – a glowing review and some very lovely words. (Following the link may result in a pop-up asking if you want to subscribe to Substack – just click ‘no thanks’ and you should be able to see the post.)

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the course on my Teachable site here.

And you can buy my hand-dyed threads here

It will probably be a while before I dye more fabric or threads, so what’s in the shop is currently all there is. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I may never be able to keep up with the demand for thread (it’s physically impossible for one person, I had mild repetitive strain injury from winding the last batch) so new thread will happen as and when I can fit it in.

For now, I need to set aside some time to read, gather some thoughts, and start some new work – more of which later.

2023

And that’s that. I hadn’t anticipated when I started this in January that this year’s stitch journal might become a cloth book, but now I can’t see it as anything else.

2023: the year of the book

I’ve had a few messages recently asking if my PDFs or my online course include instructions for making the cloth book. They don’t, but there’s a blog post here that might help you to see how to make something similar.

New Year’s Eve inevitably encourages reflection on the days that have gone. There have been winter-into-spring days:

Spring days:

Long summer days:

Flowery summer days:

Early autumn days:

Autumn-into-winter days:

Actually let’s linger here for a moment as I think the leaves are my favourite:

Early winter days:

And ending at the beginning, in the winter:

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit and read my blog throughout the year. An especially huge thank you if you have purchased my PDFs, threads, fabrics, and online courses in the last twelve months – you have made it possible for me to make a living doing what I love. I’m enormously grateful to each and every one of you.

Tomorrow I’ll be starting on 2024, using my new template. I have no idea how it will work, but I’m looking forward to finding out. (A brief description of how I made the cover for it is here.)

I hope 2024 brings peace, joy and fulfilment to you. And – of course – some happy stitching.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Padded-sleep-mask Download

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.

Category: teaching

Make your own Sketchbook

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On tension

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Shop news

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Creative English Paper-Piecing

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Promotion

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2023

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New online course

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Journal to Book

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Creating darkness (and a free sleep mask pattern)

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Teachable

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