intuitive daily stitching textile artist, stitching by hand, thread, embroidery, stitch journal

New PDFs for daily stitching

After a few weeks of very enjoyable drawing and writing, the new PDFs are out. I *think* they’re ok but let me know if you find any glaring errors and I will fire the proofreader (that’s me).

These PDFs are meant to give a little help and direction with daily stitching on the days when you hit a wall and can’t get started.

There are currently four PDFs to choose from, sixty little design sketches in each volume: Lines, Circles, Nature, and Scatter patterns, with brief stitching directions for each sketch.

Volume 3, Nature (mostly flowers and leaves)

There’s also a blank page in each volume for you to jot down your own designs, and once you get started you will find yourself coming up with many more ideas of your own.

The PDFs assume that you are familiar with, and able to execute, some basic stitch types. My online class, Intuitive Daily Stitching, goes through these stitches in some detail and suggests various ways in which you can be creative with some simple stitches. Alternatively, you can consult one of the many embroidery reference books or free online tutorials for help learning some simple stitches.

Occasionally people have trouble accessing the download, so there’s now a ‘Help with PDFs’ page in the shop header with the following diagram and instructions:

The cover photos show samples of some of the designs so that you can see how they might look in real life. Be as creative as you like with colours and thread types.

I really enjoyed putting these together, and I hope you find them helpful. Have a fabulous week.

April 2026

And that was April.

As always, nowhere near long enough.

The colour palette is starting to warm up as the days get longer and sunnier. April has been very dry so far and the garden needs rain.

Today sees the top third of my cloth full: four months of this year vanished and yet still present.

Tomorrow, onwards.

Behind the scenes

There hasn’t been much happening front of house for a couple of weeks because I’ve been busy back stage working on some new PDFs. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you might have seen a preview of this in my video earlier this week.

I’ve had a lot of messages and social media comments this year from daily stitchers asking for more direction on what to stitch. With over four years of daily stitching behind me, I have more than enough to share.

So I’ve spent the last few weeks developing four themed PDFs, 60 designs in each:

lines/bands/stripes

circles/spirals/swirls

flowers and foliage

little/scatter patterns

I need to work up some more samples for the front covers and find another couple of pages-worth of designs, but I think I’m nearer the end than the beginning.

I’ve had requests for a book rather than PDFs, but there’s no way I have the head space to tackle a book right now. Books can take months, often years, to get from idea to publication; I hope there will be one at some point in the future though. In the meantime PDFs are relatively simple to make, and much easier to distribute.

Also, and this has made me do the hollow gallows laugh, a couple of friends suggested the PDF thing after I’d already started quietly working on it. Responding ‘you’re never going to believe this but…’ is hardly ever convincing but I think I got away with it.

Anyway, for now – more proof-reading/editing, a little more drawing, and some quiet stitching. It’s been really enjoyable rediscovering some previous designs and working them up into samples.

I hope you’re enjoying your creative stitching too.

Have a lovely weekend.

March 2026

Here we are, on the last day of March – a quarter of the year gone already.

There was a little basket of daffodils for St David on the first day…

… some flowers for Mothering Sunday…

…a shamrock for St Patrick…

… and equal day and night at the spring equinox

We changed the clocks here in the UK at the weekend, so we lose an hour that we’ll get back in October. It baffles me why we have to do this. I know there are the all the myths and arguments about lighter evenings etc, but evenings will get lighter whether we change the clocks or not because that’s what happens in summer. Maybe the human race thinks it has some sort of mastery over time because we can arbitrarily change what the clock says. I don’t always think of myself as entirely human, by the way.

In any case, it happens whatever I think, so I’m pretending it’s 1pm even though I *know* it’s only noon. There’s a video of today’s stitching on my YouTube channel today, if you’re interested.

In other news, I’m still grappling with threads, which will be in the shop after Easter. More on that later. Another reminder that the shop will close at noon (ish) on Thursday and will re-open after the Easter bank holidays.

Hope your week is going well.

January 2026

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.

There were early days

There were cold sparkly frosty days

And in-between 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

And some snowdrops for Imbolc

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.

Thread storage

I’ve been posting some daily stitching videos on my YouTube channel since 1st January.

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.

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.

There’s a video tutorial for that here

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.

And so we continue.

Continuing

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.

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.

New Year’s Eve 2025

And here we are, the end of the year already.

365 blocks of hand embroidery, one every day for twelve months, each stitch witnessing the passage of time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wintering

I’m taking a break now for a week or two, to enjoy some rest and quiet reflective time.

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.

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.

Goals

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.

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.

I cheated with the cover and just changed the 5 to a 6

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.

You can see the making of this one here.

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.

Tag: intuitive daily stitching

New PDFs for daily stitching

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April 2026

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Behind the scenes

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March 2026

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January 2026

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Thread storage

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Continuing

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New Year’s Eve 2025

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Wintering

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Goals

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