Just to let you know I’ll be taking a short break next week for a week or two, depending on how much down time there is. It’s all been very full-on this summer, as you know, and I think there’s space for me to slow down a bit now.
I’ll be closing the shop for tangible items (thread and fabric) from lunchtime on Friday 11th September, and I’ll re-open later this month. My Teachable school doesn’t have a holiday mode so that will remain open as usual. If you need to contact me about any problems with access etc, please be patient as I won’t be checking emails every day.
You may have noticed my hand-dyed threads have been temporarily unavailable in the shop this week.
Recently there have been a few hard weeks, and I’m currently having another very full week arranging a residential care home placement for my mother, who is unfortunately no longer able to continue living alone. I’ve been unable to manage the shop on top of all that.
There has been a different kind of sewing. When I was at school (and that’s a very long time ago) my mother patiently sewed name labels into all my school clothes. And now I am doing the same for her.
laundry marking
It is a strange feeling. The wheel turns, time carries us along, and at some point we come full circle.
I need a few more days to gather together everything she will need, and also to get myself to a point where I can think straight, but threads will be available again soon – probably next week some time. Please keep checking the shop if you’re waiting.
Also, threads may be intermittently available if I have to be somewhere else for a while. If you visit the shop and don’t see thread, please just check back later or the next day. Apologies for the current unpredictability, and thank you for your patience.
Comments are off on this one; I will be back soon (ish).
This is just a short update on availability (my own, and my threads). Unfortunately, last week was not the relaxing break I’d been hoping for. There has been a family emergency which will take significant time and effort to resolve.
The shop is now open again for PDFs only, because they are automated and require little input from me, but threads will continue to be unavailable until such time as I am able to be here more reliably for packaging and posting.
When threads do become available again the shop may continue to open and close fairly erratically, depending on where I need to be and what I need to do, and I may not be able to respond to email enquiries as promptly as usual. If you find the shop closed, please just check back in a day or two.
Comments are off on this one, but thank you for your patience and understanding while I navigate the very unpredictable path ahead.
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.
daily stitching
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
PDF volume 1 for editing
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.
sample grids ready for stitching
I hope you’re enjoying your creative stitching too.
I’ll be taking a break soon so my online shop will close at lunchtime GMT (ish) on Wednesday 25th February and will reopen week commencing 9th March.
Teachable doesn’t seem to have a vacation mode, so that will remain open and accessible for online classes and PDF template downloads. If you need to contact me and it can’t wait a couple of weeks, please be patient because I won’t be checking emails every day.
There will probably be a daily stitching video on my YouTube channel tomorrow but after that I’m largely unplugging from social media for a week or so.
I’ll be having some quiet time at home, maybe working a bit on these:
Tabula Rasa, detailTabula Rasa, detailunnamed quilt, in progress
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.
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.
I was a little disappointed to find that my new backpack doesn’t have a designated pen holder section. Lots of other very useful zipped pockets, but no pen pocket. And as someone who always has a pen about them, this was a bit of a problem.
Easy enough to fix, as it turned out.
DIY pen holder
A piece of mount board cut to fit the zipped section, covered with collage papers, a band of elastic stitched down across the middle and there it is. It fits into a zipped pocket perfectly and keeps pens and other drawing equipment nicely accessible.
Thank you so much to my wonderful US customers for your recent orders; parcels are winging their way to you and hopefully – keeping all fingers and toes crossed – they should arrive in the US before August 29th. The Royal Mail target for international tracked mail is 5-7 working days, so we should be ok unless there’s some kind of international air disaster, but let’s try not to think about that.
I had intended to suspend all further US orders from Wednesday, but I’ve decided to bring that forward to today. The dates are causing me too much anxiety, and all I can think about is what if international post gets delayed and you all get hit with an $80 charge. It’s unlikely, but I’d prefer to play this as safe as I can, so today is my last day for posting to you. I’m sorry if you’ve missed out; do contact me if you have any questions.
In the meantime, US customers can still support me by taking my online classes – the White House machine isn’t tariffing digital products (yet!)
On to happier things. When I can, I’m continuing to work on this long cloth, Tabula Rasa.
Tabula Rasa, in progress
It’s about 6″ wide and several feet long. Part autobiography, part therapy, part self portrait. Lots of sheer and semi-sheer layers, with stitching beneath and on top of the surface.
Tabula Rasa, in progress
It’s rare for me to make something I like, or something I feel proud of, but this is it, happening right here. It’s a joyous feeling.
Tabula Rasa, in progress
It’s also rare for me to use a limited colour palette in such a sustained way, but I’m finding that I like that too.
Tabula Rasa, in progress
Progress is slow, because there are Many Other Things I need to attend to right now (more on that later) (and it’s nowhere near as exciting or intriguing as I’m making it sound!) But a few quiet moments on this cloth in between the general busyness is proving to be very calming and grounding.
I’m so sad to be losing my lovely US community. I hope the day we can reconnect through tangible thread is not too far away.
