Recently I wondered what a monochromatic mixed media sketchbook might look like, containing explorations of line and shape but exclusively using tone instead of colour. I figured there was only one way to find out.
black and white sketchbook
I’ve made a sketchbook, about 10″ square, including black and white papers of various thicknesses and textures. It had to have a cover, of course:
sketchbook, front coversketchbook, back cover
I’ve painted some collage papers using only black and white paints and inks.
painted collage papers
Early days, but so far it’s interesting. The absence of colour is making me consider tonal value much more carefully and consciously than I usually would.
black and white sketchbook
The paper you can see in the photo above is very unusual and really beautiful. It has some sort of fibre or yarn embedded in mulberry paper to form those circles.
lovely paper
I included some of my favourite Two Rivers watercolour paper and only used Mars Black watercolour with details in fine drawing pen.
landscape in one shade of black
Most of the other pages are still in progress, and I’ll probably move backwards and forwards between them.
mark-making and hand-printed paper
I guess some things really are black and white or shades of grey.
It’s a whole new adventure, and I’m not quite sure how or why it happened, but I appear to have set up my own YouTube channel.
My channel home page on YouTube
I’m in the process of uploading my Instagram short videos, and yesterday I made a video on starting a new sketchbook, which you can see here.
This one is a little square (ish) concertina folded sketchbook, with seven pages each side, which I’ve filled with collaged illustrations and found poetry cut from an old anthology.
I’ve made it in preparation for a forthcoming course in my Teachable school on making your own sketchbooks (yes?), and very enjoyable it’s been too.
I really like the way these simple folded sketchbooks become circular, where the end is also the beginning, so I’ve created this one on the theme of day and night revolving around each other.
If you saw the beginning of this little book, here’s how it turned out (ignore all the paint on my fingers, it’ll come off eventually):
mixed media sketchbook with found poetry
The text comes from various early twentieth-century poems and I’ve just cut out and rearranged the lines and phrases to create new poems.
Day and Night title pageDay, pages 2 & 3Day, pages 4 & 5Day, pages 6 & 7Night, title pageNight, pages 2 &3Night, pages 4 & 5Night, pages 6 & 7
Returning to the subject of YouTube, I’ll be keeping teaching and online courses on Teachable but I don’t mind sharing occasional processes and techniques on my YouTube channel.
So my next question is, what would you like to see?
I’ve been working on this sketchbook for a few weeks now, finding homes for all the tiny samples and scraps of painted paper and fabrics. At the same time I’m in the process of preparing to write a new course on mixed media/collage in sketchbooks, and I find it helps to actually make the thing you intend to teach.
handmade sketchbook, 9.5″ x 6.5″
I made the very simple sketchbook, using cartridge paper and some handmade cotton rag paper – it’s just sheets of paper stacked, folded in half, and stitched along the spine. The wrap around cover is cotton rag paper and it ties with some hand-dyed cotton tape that wraps around the button. Mixed media sketchbooks often become quite bulky because of all the inserts and layers, so it helps to bundle it up like this.
Sketchbooks are sometimes regarded as preparation for something larger, but I tend to see them as valuable and inspirational objects in themselves. I see them as a place to collect abstract thoughts in the form of shape and colour, and also as a place to try different colour combinations and design elements. Some of the designs in this book may or may not become larger works, and if they don’t then it’s enough to have them as they are in the sketchbook.
Here’s a quick flip-through. The pages are about 9″ x 6″ ish:
mixed media sketchbook pages
And a closer look (details are in the captions beneath the image):
strips of painted collage papers simple mark-making with thread on layered fabric scraps (4″ square)extra fold-out page
I don’t often write in sketchbooks like this one, but I do sometimes like to add a few words of text. I have an old poetry anthology that I cut up to make found poems. I know some people have strong feelings about cutting up books, but I only ever use very old books that have missing or damaged pages. The text serves to remind me of what I was thinking when I made the image, and sometimes it might also suggest the title of a larger work.
stitched sample with found poemcollage with painted papers and textstitched sample (about 5″ square) with simple mark-making
I like the way samples in different media can support and inform each other. The top sample on the page below was made by collecting and layering fabric scraps, and then the lower image is a collage inspired by the stitched sample.
from stitch to collageinside back cover, handmade foam stamps and simple drawn grid
As I’m currently taking a temporary break from Instagram, I have a bit more time to focus on structuring the new course. It generally takes a month or more to put one together and I’m still at the thinking-it-through stage, so there’s a fair way to go. But watch this space.
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:
January/February
Spring days:
Early March
Long summer days:
June
Flowery summer days:
July
Early autumn days:
August
Autumn-into-winter days:
October
Actually let’s linger here for a moment as I think the leaves are my favourite:
Autumn leaves
Early winter days:
November
And ending at the beginning, in the winter:
December
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.)
2024: land ahoy!
I hope 2024 brings peace, joy and fulfilment to you. And – of course – some happy stitching.
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 stitch2023 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:
One of those strange conundrums – the older I get, the slower I become, but the faster time passes. That makes a net loss multiplied by two, according to my flawed logic.
There is no rush, of course, and everything takes as long as it takes. There just never seems to be enough time to do all the things I want to do.
So I am still on paper and got distracted by noticing I was running low on collage paper, so had to stop and paint some more. Actually this is one of my favourite activities. I use inks, paints and mark-making tools of various kinds to liven up old book pages, envelopes, junk mail etc. Loosening up and splashing some colour around makes for a very happy (slightly messy) afternoon.
painted collage papers in progress
The sketchbooks I made for the shop last week disappeared in about an hour, so I’ve made a few more – these are the last of them, for now at least.
blank sketchbooks, cotton rag paper with vintage silk ribbons and collage papers
And finally, in what’s turning out to be more of a news roundup than any kind of meaningful post, I’m really happy to have had my work featured by My Modern Met. You can read the article here.
Sketchbook-making, obviously. I prefer to make my own because I like to vary the paper content and size of the pages. Readymade sketchbooks are usually variations on A4 and I don’t always like the proportions.
sketchbooks, newly made
The little book with the wraparound cover below is for experimenting with various forms of ink. I have acrylic ink, ink/stamp pads, inktense blocks, and a few distress crayons, plus the more obvious drawing pens etc.
little book of ink
Just somewhere to try dripping, blotting, stamping, stencilling etc with various kinds of ink. My favourite thing so far is drawing with a little twig dipped in ink.
monochrome ink swipe with twig as drawing tool
The spread below was made by sponging yellow/purple ink onto damp paper and then using the twig to draw in the green marks. A few random splatters is always very satisfying.
ink used loosely like watercolour
I also quite like the distress crayons, which you can smudge with a bit of water. This is the wrong kind of paper really (it’s very soft cotton rag), as it won’t stand up to too much rubbing. I’ll probably try this again on more robust paper.
Tim Holtz distress crayons smudged with water
I made more sketchbooks than I will use, so I’ve added a handful or so to the shop.
I’ve been looking for a set of good quality watercolours but haven’t been able to find anything that doesn’t include a lot of colours I would never use. After falling down a few online watercolour rabbit holes, I found that you can make your own half-pan set from tubes.
Imagine the possibilities! I have quite a few little tubes already – probably far too many, but colour is too enticing to resist, and I will use it all eventually. I’m not a painter, but I do like to paint. Getting all the tubes out feels like too much hassle and mess for a quick sketchbook page, so making a pan set with the colours I’ve already got is the perfect solution.
Sketchbook page in progress: handmade sketchbook made with deckle-edge cotton paper. Drawn details are Posca paint pens and Signo uniball white pen
You can buy empty watercolour tins quite cheaply, and many of them come with empty half pans ready to fill from tubes.
Empty pan set with samples of colours I’ve already got
The result is a perfect set of watercolours, conveniently in a metal box that takes seconds to set up.
Custom water colour palette
There’s a lot of green, but then that’s what I like. There’s a mix of brands here – mostly Daniel Smith, with some Winsor & Newton, Schmincke, and Jacksons. They all sit quite happily together and mix well. Some set harder than others, but it seems to make no difference to the paint itself. The Jacksons paints still haven’t set hard after a few days, but this palette lives in a drawer and won’t be carried around, so I don’t think it matters if it doesn’t set.
I’d like to spend a bit of each day on sketchbook work, and this convenient set-up will make it so much easier to restart a daily practice. I’ve been doing some doodles just to see what happens and already they look like possible textile/stitch samples.
This week I’ve made a notebook using some light weight cotton rag paper – somewhere to collect colour palettes, swatches, and notes about colour.
Sketchbook page with colour notes
The paper signatures were easy enough – just folded pairs that could be stitched to the spine of a cover. The cover itself literally dropped through the letter box one day. I cut a corrugated cardboard mailer box to size and painted it white:
Free! Corrugated cardboard mailer cut down to size
The depth of the box turned out to be exactly the right size for a spine to fit the pile of signatures:
Signatures stitched to cardboard cover
I painted some abaca tissue paper with acrylic inks and collaged/stencilled it a bit and used that to cover the white cardboard. I’ve reinforced the spine with another layer of painted tissue.
Little book of colour (front)Little book of colour (back)
You can still see the texture of corrugated cardboard underneath the colour but it’s functioning pretty well as a book.
Next job this week is to find a way through these, when they’re dry:
Hand dyed threads – it’s like waiting for thread to dry
If I can get through them all (and if I can stop myself from keeping them!) they’ll be available from next week.
While I’m waiting for more thread to arrive in the post, I’m compiling for myself a thread catalogue. This is really just somewhere for me to organise and categorise the various types of thread that I will be stocking and dyeing.
Handmade notebook, about 5” x 7”Notebook, back cover – acrylic ink, Posca paint pens, various mark-making tools and textures
Initially this was just going to be a notebook and cover, but, well, these things often get a bit out of hand, and now it’s slightly more complicated than that.
Book wrap – couched threads and yarns on hand-dyed silk noil
The colour palette came about by accident, after I dyed these thick cotton boucle yarns, which will wrap around the whole thing to tie it shut:
Chunky cotton boucle yarns
I really like the way this very thick-and-thin dimensional cotton slub yarn can be flattened when it’s couched with long stitches:
Anyway, back to over-complicating things, and now it’s a notebook in a wraparound cover, with a pocket for index cards carrying samples and information about the various threads. The pocket came from a silk shirt that I dyed.
Wraparound book cover with notebook and pocket for index cards
I find it very useful to round up information for comparative purposes, so that I can see at a glance how (for instance) silk and cotton threads compare in terms of weight or thickness. Thread weights are sometimes given as an nm figure, which I don’t find particularly helpful. Broadly, this system translates as the number of meters per 1g of thread (the first number) and the number of plies or strands in the thread (the second number). So the silk thread pictured below has a nm of 8/2, which tells you it’s a 2-ply thread, and you get about 8 metres of it per gram. For comparison, standard sewing thread (the kind you would use in a machine) is usually something like 60 or 70/2, which is a lot finer. As a visual thinker, I find it much easier to picture thread weights in terms of wraps per inch – I’m not certain but I think this is a system that is more commonly seen in the knitting world, to help with substituting yarn weights in patterns. I find it much easier to understand that the silk thread below has about 23 wraps per inch (the number of times you can wrap it around a one-inch strip without leaving any gaps).
Silk thread wrapped around card, 23 wraps per inch
Finer silk threads, which have an nm of 16/2 and 30/2, have wraps per inch of about 29 and 44 respectively. I find this easier to visualise.
Thread index cards
I’m using commercial cotton perle threads as controls, just to see how the weights of my various hand-dyed threads will compare. And even that isn’t as ‘standard’ as you might expect. I’ve used DMC perle 3 to 8 to count wraps per inch, but I didn’t have enough DMC perle 12 so had to use a Valdani perle 12 instead. And here’s the surprise – there isn’t a huge amount of difference between DMC perle 8 (43 wpi) and Valdani perle 12 (44 wpi). I can see by enlarging the photos that the 12 card maybe isn’t wrapped as closely as the 8, but that would only account for another 3 or 4-ish.
Commercial cotton perle threads
This is turning into quite a rabbit hole, isn’t it? I expect somebody somewhere will tell me I’ve got too much time on my hands, but I find this kind of thing really fascinating. Ultimately I suspect this will end up being a self-referencing closed system that only I will understand, and I think that’s probably ok. As soon as thread reinforcements arrive, I’ll be able to start winding skeins for dyeing again – but in the meantime I’m enjoying some quite reasonable down time.
