Category: cloth books

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.

Patchwork with thread

One of the best things about a daily stitch practice is that you can use up all the odd ends of thread and yarn that seem to accumulate from other projects. If you keep it simple, you only need a yard or two of thread per day so it’s a good opportunity to use up the last bit of thread in a particular colour.

couched circle with vintage cotton thread

I only had a yard or so left of this purple and white marl yarn, and it turned out to be almost exactly the right amount to fill the circle and outline the box. I’ve stitched it down with a vintage cotton thread – maybe Sylko or Coats, it’s lost its label.

couched circle on vintage linen/cotton bed sheet

It’s exactly like patchwork, but with thread instead of fabric.

April

30 circles, 30 days. A few minutes of quiet stitching every day, each one a little oasis of calm.

April

I like the negative space. It’s like the untold part of the story, the gaps between thoughts and activities.

April

I’ve also been working a bit more on the cover, since this will eventually fold up into a book.

book cover for 2023 daily stitching

It’s very simple but it’s enough, I think.

April, detail
April, detail, cotton and silk threads
early April
April, detail – new growth and spring rain

Next month, back to the grid – squares/blocks with occasional circles. Maybe the best of both worlds.

May, in the wings

Incidentally, you can now purchase and download my 2023 templates here – 12 different templates, approximately A4 size (or 8.5″ x 11″ letter size, if you’re not in Europe): there are some grids, some blocks, some lines, some shapes. I’m looking forward to using them myself.

2023 templates

March

I don’t know where the first quarter of this year went, but at least some of it is here in daily stitches.

Daily stitching, March

The whole page is about 8” x 11”.

A page for March

A few stitches every day, some more meaningful than others, some more attractive than others. Some days are like that too.

Mid-March
Early March

This cloth is a long strip, like last year, but this time horizontal rather than vertical. The plan is to make it into a book, concertina-style, folding the months into pages and stitching them to the spine of a cover. I’ve made a start on the cover, which is vintage linen and a lovely surface to work on. There isn’t a plan for the design; I’ve just started with some simple lines of running stitch and I may or may not add to it.

2023 daily stitching book cover in progress

The page for January will be stitched to the inside front cover, then the gap between January and February will form a valley fold that can be stitched to the spine of the cover. February and March will then have a mountain fold between them, making two pages, and so on. It isn’t nearly as complicated as I’m making it sound. I think it will work.

Seeing how it might look

April will be circles.

April, waiting

February

A short month but a full page:

Spots of time

Interesting how different the dynamic is when stitching round shapes as opposed to straight-edged ones.

February on the table

I like the space around the shapes, but I also like the full page of January. Just another way of seeing, I suppose, where neither is better nor worse than the other.

A few moments in early spring

Spring is growing louder here in this part of the northern hemisphere. It amazes me every year how life just comes back so easily, how nature wakes up after her winter snooze and immediately picks up the thread again. Spring is maybe just the other side of winter.

The other side of February

There is still a lot of the year left:

March, waiting

Next month will be windows.

Spots of Time

I’m aiming to use a different template for each month this year, just to see how that works. February is pebble-shaped ‘spots of time’, a phrase from Wordsworth’s long poem The Prelude.

1st and 2nd February 2023

From Wordsworth’s text:

‘There are in our existence spots of time,
 That with distinct pre-eminence retain
 A renovating virtue, whence…
                           …our minds
 Are nourished and invisibly repaired’

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book 12, ll.208-15
3rd/4th/5th February 2023

Spots of time in this context are visual representations of time and memory, a spotlight on a few moments of life, that can hold peace and bring renovation. Time, experience and memory are really all we have. That’s our life. With the passing of time, experience becomes memory.

4th and 5th

A few stitches on a cloth is a few footsteps on a path. We may not know how long the path is or where it goes, but along the way there will be these little dots of peace and joy.

I really like the fact that this is one single layer, and that the back is accessible. I’m not so sure how that will work when the whole thing is folded concertina-style into a book, when the back will then be hidden under the folds.

The other side

The cloth is starting to soften very nicely. It’s just like getting to know a new friend.

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