Tag: time

December 2024

Memories of days past

The last day of December and the 2024 stitch journal is complete. A map of my year.

2024 stitch journal, 31″ x 30″, hand-dyed threads on vintage linen

366 days, 366 blocks, a few simple stitches marking the passing of each day.

Looking back

Days of different shapes and sizes, different colours and textures. Minutes, hours, and days that fill a life.

early 2024

This is what I mean by Stitching Life. It’s verb, noun, not adjective, noun. Stitching my life, to be more precise.

2024, detail

Every month seems to pass in a blur, however much you try to slow it down. December has been no different.

December days

I like the way this cloth displays its memories in a non-linear sequence. Because of the way I laid out the monthly blocks, the month directly above December is May, and I like the way memories of the summer sit next to the winter days. November sits underneath June, early winter sharing an improbable border with midsummer. But the flowers of summer became seeds that sleep in the winter earth, ready to wake up and grow again in the spring.

days like fields

I guess stitches are seeds too.

2024, detail

The stitched area measures about 31″ square. The fabric is the French cotton/linen bed sheet that I used last year and the year before. Next year (tomorrow!) will be the last of it.

looking back

Its function is to be a visual depiction of time passing. It’s also a mini-reference library, showing the effects you can create with a small range of very simple stitches.

It will rest in the cover that I made for it earlier in the year.

stitch journal storage
it’s a wrap

It feels right to put the year away like this, on New Year’s Eve.

And away

Ready to continue tomorrow.

hello 2025

Not starting again, just continuing. That’s what we do every day, all our lives.

Next year will be long and thin, only because that’s the shape and size of the last strip of bed sheet. If you want to try something similar, there’s a stitch journal FAQ page here on my blog. There’s also my Intuitive Daily Stitching course with instructions on how to work and combine a range of simple but effective stitches. I also show you how to choose suitable fabrics, threads and needles for your daily stitching. The course is prerecorded so you can learn at your own pace, and comes with lifetime access so you can watch as many times as you like. You can find my daily stitching templates here, or of course you can design your own.

simple stitches

Tomorrow, we go on. Wishing you a happy and peaceful 2025.

back to work…

…after the second bank holiday weekend in a row. It’s probably done me some good to take a couple of days out, though time off isn’t quite the same when you get to do what you love for a living.

The more industrious corner of my work table doesn’t know about time so it’s still exactly as it was when I downed tools on Friday. I see now it needs dusting. Thread and fabric shed their fibres all the time.

You can also see a couple of beautifully smooth pebbles from a recent trip to the seaside. I was lucky enough to find a hag stone, a pebble with holes in it, which you can just see hanging above. It’s sometimes said that they find you. I love to marvel at how old these things are, how many millions of years they’ve been around. How much time they hold.

work, waiting for me to catch up

Also on the table, appropriately enough, is Marking Time II (and thank you, Dawn, for naming it). This is another long cloth pieced from hand-dyed vintage fabrics and stitched with motifs from ancient rocks and prehistoric marks on the land.

ancient hill forts, couched cotton yarn with simple stitch on hand-dyed linen

The beautiful lightweight cotton fabric in the section below is eco-printed by Jane Hunter and makes the perfect ground for some couched cup and ring marks. I will add more stitch, of course.

cup and ring marks in progress

Easing myself back into the working week, and hoping your week ahead is a good one.

Making time

This cloth is the first in a series exploring the timeless marks found on ancient rocks. Circles, rings, spirals, and lines – all quite abstract but eternally symbolic and full of meaning.

Cup and ring marks in progress

I’ve used hand-dyed silk bourette yarn for couching the rings. It has a lovely soft texture and, unusually for silk, doesn’t have so much of a sheen. It looks and feels more like very soft wool.

The rings on the grey silk band are made with very fine silk tulle, which weighs almost nothing but has a strong will of its own and can be quite tricksy. You have to work very slowly with it and pin it down as you go, otherwise it tends to wriggle away and wander off. This is not a great photo but was only intended to show myself where the rings needed adjusting a little before committing to stitching them down.

Silk tulle rings

A few stitches later, they’re sitting quite nicely.

Silk tulle rings on hand-dyed silk, in progress.

It’s taking its time, and I’m sitting with each mark to see where it needs more. These plain running stitch circles may or may not be finished. The cloth in this section is textured silk, similar to silk noil but slightly heavier and thicker.

Running stitch circles on textured silk

Taking time to make time. All the time is already there. It’s just a matter of finding it.

Cloth in progress

The beginning

Of course I’m doing it again.

Preparing a strip of vintage linen/cotton bed sheet

I’m using the same fabric as last year: vintage metis (linen/cotton blend) bed sheet, about 13” wide by about 100” long. I’ve hemmed the long edges, just by turning an inch or so under, giving a finished width of about 11”. I’ve given it a quick dip in some tea just to knock back the whiteness, which gives me the option to use white thread some days.

This year I’m using a slightly different format. Instead of one long continuous scroll, I’ll fold the strip concertina-style to form twelve separate pages so that the finished thing will look like a book.

In book form

I’m trying different templates this year too, just to see how it looks. Some pages will be circles, some will be rows or columns, some blocks will have spaces between. Haven’t quite thought this through, but the process is supposed to be intuitive, so I don’t want to over-plan.

Trying different layouts for each month

I’ve begun with some very simple stitches. I’ve marked out this month’s grid but haven’t yet completed the outlines – I may do that as I go along, I’ll see how it goes. There are no rules.

A blue beginning
The back, showing the hemmed edge

From today I am no longer employed, so this marks the start of a new way of life for me and an adventure. I’m looking forward to having more time this year to focus on my own work, to set up some online classes, dye more thread and fabrics, create some embroidery patterns and templates – and maybe a few more things besides.

Lines

I’ve been very happy to know that so many people are planning to start their own daily stitch practice. I find it very restorative to reserve a few minutes a day for some quiet time with fabric and thread. Just a few stitches, just to see what happens.

I also like seeing time mapped out like this. A calendar has the same function, of course, but somehow this has more impact for me.

January

Here’s to all new beginnings.

(Not) numbering the days

I have taken to rolling up and pinning the stitch journal, just to stop it getting so unwieldy. It’s a long strip, about 7 or 8 feet, and it tends to unroll itself as I stitch each daily block.

Safety pins keeping it together

I unrolled it today, just to see everything in context. Winter into spring.

The year so far

And what I find myself thinking is: those are 69 days of my life that I will never see again. I know I was there, because I stitched each block. But do I remember all those days? I don’t. And, of course, we can’t possibly remember everything. We only tend to remember the exceptionally good and the exceptionally bad things that happened on those days.

A number of days

I’m deliberately choosing not to mark the stitch journal with numbers or dates, because the calendar is arbitrary really. Who decided that our years begin on January 1st? We are born, and we live for some days, and then our days end, and the calendar has very little to do with it. The calendar just gives us something on which to pin and memorialise our experience. The days just join up.

I found myself wondering about how many days we can expect, in general. If you live to be 80 you get about 30,000 days. You spend about 10,000 of those days asleep. Factor in all the other practical necessary things that take time – washing, cooking, eating, going to work, etc – and it really isn’t very long. Factor in war and disease, for those people in terrible circumstances, and it’s even less.

The most recent days

This isn’t about making the most of every minute, or trying to cram more things in because life is short. Sometimes just being alive – just being – is enough, and sometimes that takes a lot of mental and emotional energy. Even when we’re sitting still, time is passing and taking us along for the ride.

The day before yesterday. The Welsh have a lovely word for it: echdoe

I wonder about the empty space still to come, the section of blank sheet that is still to be unrolled. The days I will stitch together. The white sheet, that is the foundation for the stitch journal, is antique/vintage French metis (a linen/cotton blend), and will itself have seen birth, life, and death. So much time rolled up in my hands. We are lucky to be here.