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.
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.
It wasn’t much of a week off in the end, because – surprise – this happened:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Halfway through November seems a bit early to be thinking about next year, but really it’s only a few weeks away. I thought now would probably be a good enough time to share my plans for 2026 daily stitching.
Next year I’m returning to the large square format, only because I happened to have a piece of vintage Metis (linen/cotton blend) that is almost exactly the right size and shape for twelve templates in a 4 x 3 configuration (4 columns, 3 rows). I’m also returning to a more linear grid, really just for a change. The last two years have been templates with irregular/wavy lines, and this year the grid lines are straight. No better or worse, just different. If you purchase the PDF, the twelve separate monthly templates are rectangular, so will tessellate either as a long strip (sideways or lengthways) or as a large square(ish) panel like mine. Or indeed as separate pages that you can join together later.
As always, the monthly templates are hand-drawn so the grid is not perfectly regular; some blocks are slightly wider or longer, and there are a few elongated or smaller blocks to accommodate the variation in the number of days in each month.
I worked a practice panel first, just to see. I’ve made it into a simple fold-over clutch bag to keep next year’s daily stitching in.
The simple grid comes with a dozen or so shapes that you can cut out and stick to card, and you can then use them to draw round. This is how I’ve made the circles, hearts, leaf, triangle, star and house shapes in the example above.
Of course you can make up your own grid and/or shapes as well, whatever has meaning for you.
Here’s the back of the clutch-bag-case-carry thing, for an idea of how it might look:
One of the reasons I’m releasing the template earlier than new year is that you might want to do the same kind of preparation that I’m doing. I’m couching decorative yarns along all the gridlines so that the spaces are ready to fill each day, either with stitching or with a shape template.
If you don’t have decorative yarns then you can work whipped running stitch, stem stitch, split stitch, back stitch – or any other kind of outlining stitch, just to mark in the lines. I’ve drawn the lines on my linen with a standard ballpoint pen, which doesn’t show once you’ve covered it with yarn or stitch.
Seeing a whole future year laid out like this is always intriguing. The days look like blank spaces, ready to be filled – some with joy, some with sorrow, others with tragedy or celebration. But of course time isn’t out there waiting for us. We are time, here and now as well as then and when, and our time is recorded on a cloth with needle and thread as it passes.
I’m really looking forward to working with this template, even though time isn’t square and time doesn’t run in straight lines. I’m thinking of each space as looking through a viewfinder, finding a detail in the bigger picture.
If you’re interested enough to follow along and stitch your own, you can buy my daily stitching templates here. You don’t have to use the 2026 template, by the way; any of the templates will work for any year – though if you use the 2024 one, you’ll need to smoosh two blocks together because that was a leap year so has an extra day. All the others will work fairly flexibly.
If you’re new to daily stitching, you might like to take a look at my Intuitive Daily Stitching online course here.
I’m looking forward to a little more happy stitching; I hope you are too.
The end of October, and the beginning of the long dark winter nights. My favourite time of year.
As always, the time flies.
Many of the daily blocks are outlined with textured yarn – silk or cotton boucle, or cotton slub. I use mainly my own hand-dyed silk and cotton threads for the stitching.
Todayās ghostly grey stripes for Samhain (or Halloweāen) are in fine silk. Looking at, looking between, looking beyond; sensing the veil between the worlds.
As usual, some daily blocks turned out better than others. Thatās life.
None of it matters, really. This is just a visual witness to the passage of time as each day moves to the next. These are moments within the days in my life. Moments arrive and then are gone forever, the present constantly melting into the past before our very eyes.
The other side is almost as interesting.
And the end of the year is in sight:
Iāll be back later in the month with news of the templates for 2026. Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend and happy stitching.
Another month completed and only the last quarter of the year left.
As always, there’s no plan at all – just thread a needle and begin. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s how life is. I don’t judge the daily stitching; it is what it’s meant to be, however it turns out.
As usual, it’s mostly straight stitch and running stitch in various guises. Life is complicated enough at the moment.
There were poppies for my mother’s birthday earlier this month.
Today is a few back stitch squiggles. Two steps forward, one step back, a path that loops back on itself sometimes but still gets to where it’s headed eventually. Taking the scenic route, perhaps.
The other side is just another kind of perspective on where we’ve been.
And October tomorrow…
Onward and maybe upward. Most paths lead somewhere.
I’ll be back later this week with what I hope might be good news for those of you in the USA. š