Karen Turner Stitching Life textile artist stitching by hand

Winter: studio time

So far my plans for smarter working this year are going well, and I’ve found a little time here and there for some creative play. I’m not entirely comfortable calling it ‘studio time’ because I don’t have a studio and also I’m not ‘an artist’ in the establishment sense of the word. Middle-aged woman tearing up paper in the spare bedroom doesn’t really sound all that engaging though.

I guess we are all artists, in our own way.

I’ve been working on (playing with) collaging the pages of an old 6″ x 8″ notebook, using my own painted papers. You learn how to do this in my Painted Collage Paper and Mark-Making course, by the way. A little self-promotion there from my Marketing Manager (that’s me).

I’m intending a celebration of winter in this sketchbook. If you’ve been with me a while, you’ll know it’s my favourite season, and January is my favourite month. It’s cold, it’s still dark, it’s grey, it’s quiet, and nothing much happens, and all of that suits me perfectly. And we’re half way through it already. It’s ok, I like spring too.

For now all I’ve done is cover the pages with printed/painted papers. I’ll go back in to each page with either more paint, mark-making, more collage, or some text.

I’m really enjoying the muted colour palette.

There is, however, a slightly perplexing problem. I appear to have developed contact dermatitis, but only this week, and only on my right hand. Since I’ve been handling paper with both hands, my prime suspect is the acrylic medium I’ve used to stick the papers down. It seems odd to suddenly develop an allergy to something you’ve been using for years, but I can’t think what else it could be. I’ll try some (biodegradable) gloves and see if that solves the problem.

Wearing gloves is probably sensible in any case when working with paints and inks.

It’s been a good few months since I made time for activities like this, and I realise how important and restorative it is. I’m being very strict about my working hours (no social media at weekends, no working beyond 5pm, and a weekly half-day for creative exploring).

So far so good. Wish me luck with the gloves!

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.

Wintering

I’m taking a break now for a week or two, to enjoy some rest and quiet reflective time.

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.

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.

Goals

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.

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.

I cheated with the cover and just changed the 5 to a 6

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.

You can see the making of this one here.

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.

Shop news

Just to say last orders for hand-dyed threads and fabric before Christmas is Tuesday 16th December, and that’s for UK orders only now as it’s unlikely that overseas orders will reach you before the festivities.

The shop will re-open for shippable items (hand-dyed fabric and thread) around January 5th. You can still purchase PDF downloads in the meantime. If you’re purchasing a PDF, the email containing the download link will go to the email address you used for the purchase, and that email may go to your spam/junk folder. Please save the download to your device before trying to print it as you may lose access to the link if you try to print it before saving.

I’ll be taking a break from 17th to 31st December, and may not respond to emails in my usual instant manner so please be patient if you have a question or problem with any purchases.

There isn’t much of the year left, and I can see the lower hem of my 2025 daily stitching scroll.

I’ll show the whole thing around new year, when I’ll also be starting my 2026 adventure.

And finally, a reminder that you can now purchase pre-printed fabric for daily stitching via my shop on Spoonflower. Please read through the information on the blog page before purchasing.

Samples of pre-printed fabrics for daily stitching

When you buy from Spoonflower, 90% of your money goes to them. For transparency, I earn a 10% commission on each purchase, but I’m unable to help you with any questions or problems regarding your orders. For help with your printed fabric order please contact the Spoonflower help team and they should be able to assist.

Back later in the week with a little end-of-year reflection.

November 2025 daily stitching

As always, just like that. Time passed, as it does.

A few stitches every day, not knowing in advance what will happen. No plan, no design. Any given moment could bring anything. Just a needle and thread navigating through time and hoping for the best.

I think my favourite this month is that little sprig of red leaves. I don’t know where any of these things come from.

Not many words today.

And not too much of this year left…

A reminder, if you’re embarking on a similar journey next year (and whoa, suddenly that’s next month 😳), that you can find my daily stitching templates here, and you can now purchase pre-printed fabric here. There is also a page here with Stitch Journal FAQs and general information.

Pre-printed fabric for daily stitching

Some quite exciting news.

You can now buy fabric pre-printed with my Intuitive Daily Stitching templates from my print on demand stores. This is something I’ve often been asked for, and finally I’ve been able to work out a way of doing it.

Basically you will need to select the template design that you want, and then select a yard of your preferred fabric to have it printed on. The fabric is then printed especially for you and sent to you directly from the print on demand site. The set of twelve monthly templates is centred on the fabric and is designed to fit one yard, so this is the quantity you will need to purchase.

You can find the options in my Spoonflower shop and my Woven Monkey shop (Spoonflower is based in the US; Woven Monkey is here in the UK). The template files are labelled with years (2022, 2023, 2024, etc) but this is only to reflect the year in which I first stitched them. They all have 365 daily blocks, so every set of templates will work for any year. For leap years you will just need to divide any daily block in two to create the extra day.

For more information about the templates, please visit my Big Cartel shop and read the summaries for the templates you find most appealing. Broadly, they will look something like this when printed on the fabric (you will probably need to zoom in a bit to see them more clearly):

The way most of the templates are arranged on the fabric is four columns and three rows, back and forth, so the pathway through the year works like this:

The 2024 version is rather different in that it’s more of a sprawling map than a formal grid, and you may need the paper templates as well to make sense of that one.

Having the fabric printed this way means that the format of the daily stitching templates will be roughly a square on a square yard of fabric. There isn’t currently a way to print the templates as a long strip, which is what you can opt to do if you transfer the templates onto fabric yourself from my PDFs.

I’ve done daily stitching both ways, as a long strip and as a large square, and I don’t find that one is any easier or more difficult than the other. It’s the same volume of fabric, whether it’s long or square, and you only need to handle the bit you’re currently working on. But something to bear in mind if you think you might find working on a large square piece a bit unwieldy.

If you’re in the UK, my shop on Woven Monkey will be easier and cheaper in terms of postage costs; if you’re in the USA then my Spoonflower shop will probably be better for you. If you’re anywhere else in the world, please check the postage rates to your country for both sites to find the best deal.

If you’re buying the printed fabric from Woven Monkey, I would probably recommend printing the templates on their cotton drill or faux linen.

If you’re buying from Spoonflower, I would suggest their linen cotton canvas will probably give best results.

Please note that you literally just get a yard of printed fabric when you purchase this way; the daily blocks or months are not numbered or labelled, and there are no instructions. If you need the additional supporting information, you can purchase and download the accompanying PDFs here.

If you’re intending to use your completed embroidery as a functional item, you will need to wash your fabric (cool gentle machine or hand wash) before stitching as there will be some slight shrinkage.

There’s a video here showing you some of the options and how it works:

see how it works

If you have any questions about this, or there’s something I didn’t mention, please ask in the comments section below.

Have a lovely weekend.

Preparing for 2026: new Daily Stitching Templates

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.

Karen Turner Stitching Life

Winter: studio time

Like this:

Thread storage

Like this:

Continuing

Like this:

New Year’s Eve 2025

Like this:

Wintering

Like this:

Goals

Like this:

Shop news

Like this:

November 2025 daily stitching

Like this:

Pre-printed fabric for daily stitching

Like this:

Preparing for 2026: new Daily Stitching Templates

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: