Time flies. The first month of daily stitching for 2026 is complete, and the cloth fills up almost on its own while we’re looking the other way.
January 2026, daily stitching
There were early days
early January 2026
There were cold sparkly frosty days
early January 2026
And in-between days
late January 2026January days
New for this year are YouTube videos of daily stitching. Definitely not every day but maybe once or twice a week, when I can. I have some responsibilities at present, and much depends on how much of that needs my attention.
For now, we go onward into February
February ahead
And some snowdrops for Imbolc
1st February
If you’re having your own daily stitching adventure this year, I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. This is my fifth year, and it’s still just as necessary and enjoyable as it ever was. I think of it as a little oasis of peace in an increasingly turbulent world.
I won’t post a daily stitching video every day, mainly because I can’t be available 365 days a year, but also because sometimes I just want to stitch quietly on my own without explaining anything. There might be a video tutorial maybe once or twice a week. Ish.
But as a result of the videos, a few people were asking where they can buy the spools I store my thread on.
thread on paper spools
You probably could buy them somewhere, or you could use sections of drinking straws, but it’s easier and cheaper to make them yourself as I do.
I hope you’re enjoying your daily stitching, if you’re embarking on a new year-long adventure. The whole huge blank canvas can look quite daunting at this time of year, but time flies and the days soon fill up if you just focus on one day at a time. Good advice for life too, I guess.
A new beginning or just continuing, it’s all the same really.
Today is about the Roman god Janus who looks back to the year just gone and forward at what’s to come. Stitches pointing backwards, and stitches pointing ahead.
1st January 2026
There’s a video of this one on my YouTube channel. I might do a video of tomorrow’s stitching too, but there definitely won’t be a video every day.
I’ve never intended the daily stitching to be a challenge or a stitch-along; I don’t provide prompts, themes, or directions for daily stitching. It’s more about being guided by your own intuition, and stitching something that is meaningful for you.
Hope everyone’s new year has got off to a good beginning.
365 blocks of hand embroidery, one every day for twelve months, each stitch witnessing the passage of time.
2025 daily stitching
Time is all we have, and time is all that we are. We have time, we make time, we find time, we save time, we spare time, we waste time, we spend time. We are time.
time capsule
This year’s stitching is about 7″ wide and 122″ long, cotton and silk embroidery threads on vintage cotton/linen blend.
People ask me what will I do with it. I don’t ‘do’ anything with it. It’s enough for it to be itself, a surface onto which I have inscribed time with needle and thread, a cloth I have held in my hands every day for a year, a cloth that holds and remembers moments from my life. The cloth will still be here when I am not.
completed stitching in protective cover
New Year’s Eve is a time for a final glance back, over our shoulder, before we move unsteadily forward into more of the unknown.
2025: January, the beginning2025: January/February2025: March2025: April 2025: April/May2025: May/June2025: June/July2025: July/August2025: August/September2025: September/October2025: October/November2025: November2025: December
Of course this is not the end, nor is it a new beginning. It’s just the continuation of time. Tomorrow is only ever the day after today, when we gather ourselves to begin again.
2026 ahead
Happy new year to you all, and happy stitching if you’re embarking on a new stitch adventure for 2026.
2025: all of it
You can find my daily stitching PDF templates here, information about pre-printed fabric from Spoonflower here, and information about my online classes here. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel here for occasional daily stitching videos.
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.
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.
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.
You can now buy fabric pre-printed with my Intuitive Daily Stitching templates from my print on demand stores. This is something I’ve often been asked for, and finally I’ve been able to work out a way of doing it.
Basically you will need to select the template design that you want, and then select a yard of your preferred fabric to have it printed on. The fabric is then printed especially for you and sent to you directly from the print on demand site. The set of twelve monthly templates is centred on the fabric and is designed to fit one yard, so this is the quantity you will need to purchase.
printed fabric samples
You can find the options in my Spoonflower shop and my Woven Monkey shop (Spoonflower is based in the US; Woven Monkey is here in the UK). The template files are labelled with years (2022, 2023, 2024, etc) but this is only to reflect the year in which I first stitched them. They all have 365 daily blocks, so every set of templates will work for any year. For leap years you will just need to divide any daily block in two to create the extra day.
For more information about the templates, please visit my Big Cartel shop and read the summaries for the templates you find most appealing. Broadly, they will look something like this when printed on the fabric (you will probably need to zoom in a bit to see them more clearly):
The way most of the templates are arranged on the fabric is four columns and three rows, back and forth, so the pathway through the year works like this:
The 2024 version is rather different in that it’s more of a sprawling map than a formal grid, and you may need the paper templates as well to make sense of that one.
Having the fabric printed this way means that the format of the daily stitching templates will be roughly a square on a square yard of fabric. There isn’t currently a way to print the templates as a long strip, which is what you can opt to do if you transfer the templates onto fabric yourself from my PDFs.
I’ve done daily stitching both ways, as a long strip and as a large square, and I don’t find that one is any easier or more difficult than the other. It’s the same volume of fabric, whether it’s long or square, and you only need to handle the bit you’re currently working on. But something to bear in mind if you think you might find working on a large square piece a bit unwieldy.
If you’re in the UK, my shop on Woven Monkey will be easier and cheaper in terms of postage costs; if you’re in the USA then my Spoonflower shop will probably be better for you. If you’re anywhere else in the world, please check the postage rates to your country for both sites to find the best deal.
If you’re buying the printed fabric from Woven Monkey, I would probably recommend printing the templates on their cotton drill or faux linen.
If you’re buying from Spoonflower, I would suggest their linen cotton canvas will probably give best results.
Please note that you literally just get a yard of printed fabric when you purchase this way; the daily blocks or months are not numbered or labelled, and there are no instructions. If you need the additional supporting information, you can purchase and download the accompanying PDFs here.
If you’re intending to use your completed embroidery as a functional item, you will need to wash your fabric (cool gentle machine or hand wash) before stitching as there will be some slight shrinkage.
There’s a video here showing you some of the options and how it works:
see how it works
If you have any questions about this, or there’s something I didn’t mention, please ask in the comments section below.
Halfway through November seems a bit early to be thinking about next year, but really it’s only a few weeks away. I thought now would probably be a good enough time to share my plans for 2026 daily stitching.
Next year I’m returning to the large square format, only because I happened to have a piece of vintage Metis (linen/cotton blend) that is almost exactly the right size and shape for twelve templates in a 4 x 3 configuration (4 columns, 3 rows). I’m also returning to a more linear grid, really just for a change. The last two years have been templates with irregular/wavy lines, and this year the grid lines are straight. No better or worse, just different. If you purchase the PDF, the twelve separate monthly templates are rectangular, so will tessellate either as a long strip (sideways or lengthways) or as a large square(ish) panel like mine. Or indeed as separate pages that you can join together later.
As always, the monthly templates are hand-drawn so the grid is not perfectly regular; some blocks are slightly wider or longer, and there are a few elongated or smaller blocks to accommodate the variation in the number of days in each month.
I worked a practice panel first, just to see. I’ve made it into a simple fold-over clutch bag to keep next year’s daily stitching in.
practice piece
The simple grid comes with a dozen or so shapes that you can cut out and stick to card, and you can then use them to draw round. This is how I’ve made the circles, hearts, leaf, triangle, star and house shapes in the example above.
optional extras
Of course you can make up your own grid and/or shapes as well, whatever has meaning for you.
triangle tree in feather stitch
Here’s the back of the clutch-bag-case-carry thing, for an idea of how it might look:
sampler, back
One of the reasons I’m releasing the template earlier than new year is that you might want to do the same kind of preparation that I’m doing. I’m couching decorative yarns along all the gridlines so that the spaces are ready to fill each day, either with stitching or with a shape template.
preparing the grid lines
If you don’t have decorative yarns then you can work whipped running stitch, stem stitch, split stitch, back stitch – or any other kind of outlining stitch, just to mark in the lines. I’ve drawn the lines on my linen with a standard ballpoint pen, which doesn’t show once you’ve covered it with yarn or stitch.
Seeing a whole future year laid out like this is always intriguing. The days look like blank spaces, ready to be filled – some with joy, some with sorrow, others with tragedy or celebration. But of course time isn’t out there waiting for us. We are time, here and now as well as then and when, and our time is recorded on a cloth with needle and thread as it passes.
looking ahead
I’m really looking forward to working with this template, even though time isn’t square and time doesn’t run in straight lines. I’m thinking of each space as looking through a viewfinder, finding a detail in the bigger picture.
If you’re interested enough to follow along and stitch your own, you can buy my daily stitching templates here. You don’t have to use the 2026 template, by the way; any of the templates will work for any year – though if you use the 2024 one, you’ll need to smoosh two blocks together because that was a leap year so has an extra day. All the others will work fairly flexibly.
If you’re new to daily stitching, you might like to take a look at my Intuitive Daily Stitching online course here.
I’m looking forward to a little more happy stitching; I hope you are too.
The end of October, and the beginning of the long dark winter nights. My favourite time of year.
October 2025 daily stitching
As always, the time flies.
October, daily stitching (detail)
Many of the daily blocks are outlined with textured yarn – silk or cotton boucle, or cotton slub. I use mainly my own hand-dyed silk and cotton threads for the stitching.
Today’s ghostly grey stripes for Samhain (or Hallowe’en) are in fine silk. Looking at, looking between, looking beyond; sensing the veil between the worlds.
31st October
As usual, some daily blocks turned out better than others. That’s life.
October, daily stitching (detail)
None of it matters, really. This is just a visual witness to the passage of time as each day moves to the next. These are moments within the days in my life. Moments arrive and then are gone forever, the present constantly melting into the past before our very eyes.
The other side is almost as interesting.
October, the other side
And the end of the year is in sight:
Two months to go
I’ll be back later in the month with news of the templates for 2026. Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend and happy stitching.
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.
