textile art textile artist, stitching by hand, thread, embroidery, stitch journal

July 2026 daily stitching

The last day of July today, and time seems to be flying even faster than usual. As always, I’ve been catching a few moments of each day and stitching them down. Time is life, and the most precious thing we have.

You can see some of the daily blocks for this month in the July playlist on my You Tube channel.

Summer is probably my least favourite season overall, but I’ve enjoyed using a brighter colour palette. I have a new collection of hand-dyed threads in summer/early autumn colours in my shop (sorry, UK-only shipping for now).

July has been very challenging, personally, but I am focusing on one day at a time and placing stitches like footsteps. Eventually the path will lead to a quieter calmer place.

And tomorrow, August begins. It’s intriguing to think that all those blank spaces will be full in just thirty-one days’ time.

I hope you’re enjoying your own daily stitching adventure, if you’ve embarked on such a thing. If nothing else, it provides a little quiet breathing space in a busy day.

Have a lovely weekend, and happy stitching.

June 2026 daily stitching

And here we are, halfway through the year already.

The month soon fills up.

Today was a simple leaf outline, and you can see it in action on my YouTube channel.

This month has presented difficulties and challenges, most of which are now ongoing. The best policy so far has been to keep calm and stitch.

July ahead:

And the year so far:

Amazing what a few minutes a day can do.

Quilter-couching

You probably know couching is one of my favourite techniques, and I’m currently conducting an experiment to see how effectively couching might substitute for quilting.

I don’t often get as much time as I’d like for my own work but I’ve been squeezing in an hour here and there on this little quilt that began in June 2024 as a heap of little patches that needed stitching together.

It’s hand-pieced, from lots of vintage and contemporary scraps – past and present sitting side by side, as they do in life – and most of the stitching is either couching or very simple embroidery.

The whole thing measures about a square yard or so.

The red circle is about 10 inches in diameter and began as lines of straight stitch. That didn’t give a prominent enough amount of colour, so I’ve threaded the straight stitches with a fine wool yarn.

The vertical lines are still very much in progress, and there are lots more still to do. I’m couching a fine silk bourette yarn with quilting cotton thread, and that seems to be holding the layers together pretty well. The backing is lightweight calico and the batting is Hobbs wool.

It’s all very much a work in progress. This little quilt has had many false starts and many unpickings in the two years of its construction, but I think it seems happier now and we’ll keep going until we get to wherever it is.

In other news – I’ll be taking some time out next week, so the shop will be closed temporarily for a few days while I attend to other things. Please be patient if you need to get in touch as I may not be checking emails every day.

From ‘In Which Rabbit has a busy day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings’ by A. A. Milne, illustration by E. H. Shepard

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.

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.

Back to work

It wasn’t much of a week off in the end, because – surprise – this happened:

hand dyed threads drying in the sunshine

I just got lucky with the weather – decent light followed by a good drying day – so thought I would seize the day and all that. I’ll have a couple of easy days this week to make up for it.

I did manage to catch up with myself a bit on the other days. I got to the end of Tabula Rasa, and I’m not sure that’s its name any more but I’ve yet to think of a better one.

I also enjoyed a little mixed media sketchbook exploration with some motifs based on the stitching.

The thread will take a while to wind but in the meantime there is probably enough left in the shop to cover thread-based emergencies.

For various reasons, I’ve decided to streamline and simplify my shop contents. For the time being I won’t be making more fabric packs, so most remaining fabrics are currently in the shop on sale to clear. Prices have already been adjusted so you don’t need discount codes, and when they’re gone they’re gone so be quick if you’re interested. I hope you can find something lovely to add to your collection.

hand painted sheer fabric scraps for layering

Back to work after a holiday used to mean my apathetic return to the office where a thousand emails were waiting for me. These days back to work means winding beautiful thread by an open window listening to a robin singing in the garden. What luck. Hope your week is going well too.

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.

Tag: textile art

July 2026 daily stitching

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June 2026 daily stitching

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Quilter-couching

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April 2026

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March 2026

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Back to work

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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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