Another month, taking us halfway through the year.
It’s a bit of a wobbly video, but here’s how it’s looking so far:
the year so far
Today is a few wild flowers. We don’t call them weeds in our house.
30th June
There have been some very long days, and some very hot days.
long days of June
As always, a few very simple stitches to witness the days passing.
June 2025
It doesn’t need to be complicated. Life is challenging enough without making extra work for yourself.
June, detailJune, detail
July tomorrow, and the second half of the cloth. There is a seam where I had to join two lengths, but you’ll hardly see the join once a bit of stitching covers it.
July ahead
I often look at the blank month ahead and wonder what it will bring. It seems strange to think that this time next month I will know what it brought, and today’s future will become the past. Good job I have a needle and thread to anchor me into the present.
May always feels like quite a long month to me, but not this year. The days continue to fly by and even though the days are getting longer here in the northern hemisphere, there never seem to be enough hours.
All of May
As always, a few stitches every day.
end of May
It’s been mostly winding/processing thread (and orders, thank you) and checking in with the various Making Zen groups and posts this month. Next month I hope to make a little time just for me.
May, stitch journal, detail
Of course we can’t ‘make’ time. It’s all the same time. The same twenty-four hours in every day, perpetual motion as the minutes pass and the world turns.
May, stitch journal, detail
It’s very easy to get caught up in the minutiae of daily life, and sitting with needle and thread for a few minutes every day is very calming.
May, stitch journal, detail
I calculated that it’s 1,247 days since I started this practice. I guess that’s a lot of stitching.
May, stitch journal, detail
I sometimes wonder where these annual stitch calendars will end up. I was half-joking when I said in my Making Zen chat with Kate that I might exhibit them when I’ve got ten years’ worth. Only another six and a half years to go, if that turns out to be a thing.
May, stitch journal, detail
The other side is important too: the side we don’t see, the side that forms the foundation and stability for daily work. The side that shows where you went and how you got there. It doesn’t need to be tidy or neat. Beneath the surface I suspect we’re all a fairly chaotic jumble of thoughts and feelings. It’s a kind of map, I guess. I think of these things as maps of time.
The other side of May
Looking forward to meeting June tomorrow:
June ahead
A warm welcome to all of you who are new to the blog as a result of Making Zen. Nothing much happens here, but if you enjoy a few quiet moments now and again then you’re probably in the right place. If you’re thinking of beginning your own daily stitching journey, please do take a look at my online class Intuitive Daily Stitching. Learn at your own pace, and watch as many times as you like.
And if you enjoyed my Making Zen workshop, you can take those ideas and techniques a bit further with my Stitched Samples for Sketchbooks course.
Amid all the thread winding I’m just dropping in to let you know that my recorded interview with the lovely Kate Ward of Making Zen is now available to watch on YouTube here.
It was a joy to chat with Kate about daily stitching, mark-making, time and other things, and I hope you enjoy watching it. Please do give it a thumbs up on Kate’s YouTube channel if you liked it.
In the meantime if you haven’t got your Making Zen ticket yet, you can still get it here. Upgrading to the VIP pass will let you access the workshops two weeks early, from 15th May.
zero-waste stitched samples
The VIP pass gives you full access to all the workshops plus some very generous free gifts from 32 participating artists. For transparency, I am awarded a small commission (at no extra cost to you) when you purchase your ticket from the links on this page, so you will be helping to support my work as an independent artist. Thank you so much.
You know, middle-aged English people rarely get truly excited about anything, but I am genuinely very excited to be taking part in Making Zen this month and I’m looking forward to sharing some of my favourite techniques with you.
The end of April, and that means a few more stitches for 2025.
April, detail
It’s been a busy month, and next month might be even busier.
the end of April
Mostly, as always, a few stitches with no plan or design. Just choosing a colour, threading a needle and beginning. And isn’t that how most days begin too? We set out as usual, never knowing what will happen next.
April, detail
I’m enjoying the spring palette, in real life as much as here in stitches.
April, detail
It occurred to me recently that in four years of doing this I’ve never yet missed a day. If I did miss a day, I’d leave it blank. The point here isn’t to fill a cloth with stitches, it’s to sit and witness time as it passes out of my life. If I forgot to stitch, or didn’t have time (the irony!) then I feel ‘catching up’ the next day would be kind of missing the point. I would leave a blank space to remind me that on that occasion I didn’t slow down enough to watch those few minutes ebb away.
The other side of time is always worth a look. Knots, loose ends, a scramble of thread, but that’s how it is.
For transparency, if you use this link I receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you), and you will be helping to support my work as an independent artist. Thank you.
Today is shaping up to be quite full. People are writing to me to tell me I haven’t got much thread in the shop. I know, thank you, I’m onto it. The shop will be closed for a couple of days while I attend to this:
threads for dyeing
Dyeing, washing, drying, sorting, winding, labelling, photographing and listing a batch of thread takes about a month, so thread update maybe towards the end of May, if all goes well.
I don’t pass the time, the time passes me. Every day I watch it go, picking up speed as it hurtles further away.
March 2025
There were daffodils for St David’s Day, and a row of dancing women for International Women’s Day.
March 2025, detail
There was a bouquet for Mother’s Day (here in the UK it’s the fourth Sunday in Lent).
Mother’s Day flowers
There was equal day and night for the Spring Equinox.
March 2025, detail
Some of these days are tutorials on my YouTube channel here.
shamrocks for St Patrick’s Day
Today we have blue skies.
The other side is a reflection of sorts.
the other side of March
Three months gone. A quarter of the year behind us.
First quarter
A reminder that this is the last day for the Early Bird price on my Make a Simple Sketchbook course and my Painted Collage Papers course. Courses are pre-recorded; you get lifetime access; you can download lessons or watch online as often as you like; learn entirely at your own pace.
April is going to be very busy – there is a lot going on, which I will share when I can.
The keen-eyed among you will have spotted a slight error in the April page of the 2025 daily stitching template.
whoops
It looks like I’ve omitted to erase the vertical line that runs between 9 and 10 on the template, circled in red.
I hope the solution is fairly obvious, but you just need to choose either the vertical or the horizontal line that separates 9 and 10. From the positions of the numbers, it looks as if my intention was for the division to be horizontal.
I wouldn’t mind, but I (and another person) checked these templates about a hundred times before publishing them.
I guess this is proof, if it were needed, that (a) I’m human and therefore fallible, and (b) that everything I produce is hand-drawn.
My sincere apologies for the error and for any confusion caused. Easily remedied, I hope.
And I hope the rest of my week – and yours too – passes without further frustrating errors.
The ornamental cherries are starting to flower here, so today’s daily stitching is a celebration. You can see it in progress, together with written instructions, on my YouTube channel here.
Always a short month, but this year it seems shorter than usual. I’m ending this month with an anniversary, as today is a year since we moved in to our current home.
Home
It’s taken a while for it to feel like home, but it does now and I’m looking forward to seeing our new garden grow a bit more this year. The seeds and ideas that we plant can take a while to yield visible results, and what starts as a scrap or fragment becomes part of something much bigger once it starts to grow. It all happens in its own time.
I’ve enjoyed using up scraps and odd ends this month.
circular form made with a scrap of silk fibrecurled spiral scrap of silk fibre
Running stitch, whipped running stitch, and couching are probably still my favourites. I like lines. Time lines, perhaps.
mid-February
Mostly it’s mark-making with needle and thread.
early February
There is a lovely darn on the edge of this linen, presumably made many years ago. I’m guessing this linen was probably hand-woven on a home loom because the width is much narrower than a machine-made sheet would be, and the selvedge that you can see beside the darn had originally been in the centre of the sheet where two widths had been joined. Someone, long ago and in a different home, carefully mended this cloth for the future, and their future is my present. Time does stand still sometimes.
mended
Holding time in stitches, weaving between past and future.
The long view:
February
And the other side:
the side we don’t show the world
Onward to March. Marching onward. See what I did there.
January can be a long month for many, particularly if you don’t like winter, but for me it flew by as quickly as any other.
January daily stitching
As always, it was a case of threading a needle and beginning, with no preconception of how it might turn out. There are some blocks I like less than others, but that’s to be expected with this make-it-up-as-you-go approach. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. It’s there as a witness to the impermanence of human time.
January daily stitching, detail
As always, I’ve used a variety of silk and cotton threads in different weights, from chunky boucle yarns to very fine silk. Life’s rich tapestry, and all that.
January, detail
The earliest days of January feel quite far away now, but they’re not so distant in the great scheme of things. We’re now as far from early January as we are from the end of February, which is probably a sobering thought. By that time, one-sixth of the year will be behind us.
early January
Time is always running faster than I am. It’s not so much a question of trying to catch up, it’s more an acceptance of the fact that there probably isn’t enough time to do everything I want to do. Tasks take longer as you get older, I find.
Today’s block is a spiral, couched in cotton perle 8 thread.
31st January
I always think of time as a spiral, with us travelling from the outer circles towards the centre throughout our lives. I think that’s why time seems interminable when you’re a child, and why it seems to speed up as you get older. It doesn’t, it’s just that the circular paths are a little shorter every year.
As far as the daily stitching is concerned, time is a long strip of linen. February, and the rest of the year, are ahead.
February and the rest
For anyone who has been disappointed by the news that my Facebook group (Stitching Life Community) will be closing shortly, there has been a surprise reprieve. Shannon has developed a new group for hand stitchers (daily stitching and more): Our Daily Thread. What a perfectly brilliant name for a hand stitching group (I wish I’d thought of it!) It’s a fabulous way to keep our lovely community together so you can continue to connect and share your wonderful work.
And a postscript for any new subscribers – three blog posts in one week is not my usual standard. Normal services (once a week, if that) will now be resumed.
