Don’t challenge me…

If you were to go through this blog to find the challenges I’ve taken part in, you would not need more than one hand to add them up! I don’t really know why, except that I do. I end up doing them to the exclusion of anything else because of the need to get the commitment out of the way. Believe me, that sort of takes the pleasure away!

Likewise, because of the commitment thing, I haven’t ever taken part in anything that consistently requires something of me. I know I do WOYWW each week, but that’s a bit different. I think.

You are probably as familiar with this as I am!

 Nearly seven years of adding stitches in waiting rooms and on holiday.

 I’m in no hurry with it, but I am committed to finishing it some time. 

Aaanyway. At last year’s February scrapbook retreat with my girlfriends, Lolly was infectiously enthusiastic about thread journaling. Getting a piece of fabric, sticking it in an embroidery hoop and stitching a small picture on it daily, to sum up the day, every day for a year. A YEAR! Literally, thread journaling. We all looked it up, Pinterest scared us because of the skill level; we talked about it, and then largely forgot all about it. Except it didn’t go away. Later that year I found myself buying a thread journaling kit to stash away for Christmas to give to Miss Dunnit. She likes embroidering patches and etc, so it seemed a really good gift. At our October retreat, Lolly was talking about it again and somehow made it sound eminently achievable, so I set myself up. Including Miss Dunnit, four of us are having a bash, and we’re all doing it differently. The first thing that frightened me to death was that a lot of people have 8 or 10 inch embroidery hoops and have divided the circle into 12 equal portions so that they have a clear portion to sew in each month. I can’t do the maths and really didn’t want to have to draw on the fabric. I also didn’t want to have to stitch that many straight lines. I’m not good at straight. So in the end, after humming and hawing and sketching out some alternatives, I decided for heavens’ sake, just do it.

Interestingly, having decided against sections per month, I seem to be keeping them all clumped. They are not dimensional images, I need practice and more experience. They are totally freehand though, which is why the scale varies wildly. And, I’m happy to accept that some of these little images are in need of description. So I bought a cheap diary, and each time I embroider an image, I enter it on the day’s date in the diary with a really brief description.

I’m enjoying it! It takes longer to decide what there is about any given day that needs recording in a single image than it does to actually embroider it. And of course there are days that are so ordinary that it’s a bit of a stretch. But as I can’t imagine 365 images actually fitting on this erm, canvas, it won’t matter I think, if I leave off the days where all I manage is more domestic stuff. Having said that, I have only recorded WOYWW once so far and you can see an iron…I did actually spend a long day doing nothing else in the early new year, catching up after a houseful at a Christmas! 



Close up you can see that despite washing my hands, the fabric is already grubby at the edge where I hold the hoop. Now I use that little piece of felt to protect the fabric from my grubby left thumb. You live and learn. And as for freehand…I have help. Lolly found this fab site called the Noun Project which has probably millions of icons of well, almost every noun you can think of. Very very helpful. Doesn’t mean I can stitch them to look familiar, but it helps. Ask me again in a couple of months, see if I’m keeping up! At least with a diary, I can enter the intended idea and do a catch up session if necessary- although that starts to be work rather than ten minutes with a cuppa I think. Are you doing a year long ‘thing’? I’d love to hear about it.