cloth book textile artist, stitching by hand, thread, embroidery, stitch journal

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.

September

The end of September already. October tomorrow. It really will be Christmas before we know it. No use getting ahead of ourselves here though.

I think the hag stones thing turned out OK in the end. Berries, apples, or pears would have worked equally well.

I think of the little unstitched space in each shape as a tiny bit of welcome silence. The world always seems very noisy to me.

Our house has recently gone up for sale, and we are looking for quiet. Not remote, as I don’t drive and I need a good post office within walking distance. But some quiet would be nice.

I really like the blue spiral – textured silk yarn couched with silk thread

It still surprises me how much thinking time and reflection time there is in daily stitching. There is nothing to do except focus on needle and thread while you let the thoughts come and go.

The entire page has turned out to be a visual record of our decision to look for a new home. Not in any literal or figurative sense, but I can see weighings-up, imaginings, letting gos, and looking aheads. There is a kind of loss as well as a potential gain, because every beginning is preceded by an end, and every end is followed by a beginning. It’s just one continuous line really.

Next month (sing along if you know it) – the falling leaves… drift by the window… those autumn leaves… of red and gold…

Some letting go.

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.

May

Another month seems to have disappeared in a whirl, leaving just a few stitches behind to prove it was there.

I went back to the grid formation for this month, which I like because it always feels like a more accurate representation of days: a few patches of time with no spaces between. I like the other layouts too, for different reasons.

Lots of flowering and new growth in the garden. Some days brought less happy news, but things seem to be looking a little brighter now.

Earlier in the month we found time to go and see the bluebells and wild garlic in the woods.

The front shows where you go, and the back shows how you got there. Two sides of the same story.

The stitch journal is becoming a book. I’ve stitched the first few completed pages into the spine of the cover. The music is Menuet from Bach’s Cello Suite no 1 in G major, expertly played by cellist Steven Isserlis.

it’s a book

Still a lot of the year still to go, and a few feet of linen waiting to unfold. June will be vertical stripes. Long days.

March

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

The whole page is about 8” x 11”.

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

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.

April will be circles.

February

A short month but a full page:

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

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.

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.

There is still a lot of the year left:

Next month will be windows.

January

For a month that usually seems to drag its heels, January has shot past in a blur this year. This is a sign of getting older, right?

When I started the second stitch journal, I was slightly concerned that it would turn out more or less the same as the first one and that there would be no real value in doing it again.

But what do you know? It looks quite different from last year’s. At least, it looks different to me.

Same fabric, same threads, same person. Different circumstances perhaps. Different time.

This time it’s a book rather than a long scroll, and this year I’m using a different template or layout every month.

There are signs of spring outside in the garden, and the light is starting to change. Winter will be packing its bags and moving on. There is a pun here about seeing the back of winter and showing the back of January’s stitching. Of course I wouldn’t fall into that trap, would I?

The beginning

Of course I’m doing it again.

Preparing a strip of vintage linen/cotton bed sheet

I’m using the same fabric as last year: vintage metis (linen/cotton blend) bed sheet, about 13” wide by about 100” long. I’ve hemmed the long edges, just by turning an inch or so under, giving a finished width of about 11”. I’ve given it a quick dip in some tea just to knock back the whiteness, which gives me the option to use white thread some days.

This year I’m using a slightly different format. Instead of one long continuous scroll, I’ll fold the strip concertina-style to form twelve separate pages so that the finished thing will look like a book.

I’m trying different templates this year too, just to see how it looks. Some pages will be circles, some will be rows or columns, some blocks will have spaces between. Haven’t quite thought this through, but the process is supposed to be intuitive, so I don’t want to over-plan.

I’ve begun with some very simple stitches. I’ve marked out this month’s grid but haven’t yet completed the outlines – I may do that as I go along, I’ll see how it goes. There are no rules.

From today I am no longer employed, so this marks the start of a new way of life for me and an adventure. I’m looking forward to having more time this year to focus on my own work, to set up some online classes, dye more thread and fabrics, create some embroidery patterns and templates – and maybe a few more things besides.

I’ve been very happy to know that so many people are planning to start their own daily stitch practice. I find it very restorative to reserve a few minutes a day for some quiet time with fabric and thread. Just a few stitches, just to see what happens.

I also like seeing time mapped out like this. A calendar has the same function, of course, but somehow this has more impact for me.

Here’s to all new beginnings.

Tag: cloth book

2023

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September

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Journal to Book

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May

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March

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February

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January

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The beginning

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