Tag: stitch journal

And that was May.

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.

As always, a few stitches every day.

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.

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.

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.

I calculated that it’s 1,247 days since I started this practice. I guess that’s a lot of stitching.

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.

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.

Looking forward to meeting June tomorrow:

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.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend.

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.

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.

Running stitch, whipped running stitch, and couching are probably still my favourites. I like lines. Time lines, perhaps.

Mostly it’s mark-making with needle and thread.

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.

Holding time in stitches, weaving between past and future.

The long view:

And the other side:

Onward to March. Marching onward. See what I did there.

Have a lovely weekend.