This is the beginning of my 2025 daily stitch project.
In January 2024 I embarked on a daily stitch project along with my collaborator Lisa (link: asil.ca). We envisioned the project as a way to slow down and engage in a bit of quiet, contemplative work each day, slowly building something large out of small daily acts. Here’s Lisa’s daily stitch in progress, an ever growing spiral of stitched marks responding to the events of each day:
And here’s mine, a tumbling pile of pebbles, cut from the scraps left behind from my thesis work, the days blending together into a pattern that obscures the qualities of remembered days, marking the passing of time into the blur of fading memory:
I’ll admit it: I haven’t finished my 2024 daily stitch. I struggled with doing it every day, fell behind at several times during the year and at the end of the year, despite having many days off and very few plans, I did other things instead. I’m very close to completing it, though, and am on track to be ready to baste it up for quilting by next week, if I can settle on a fabric for the back.
For this year’s edition, I’m again focusing on applied fabric pieces, as my studio is overflowing with these fabrics I block printed for my masters thesis and other projects. I’ll start in the centre and spiral outward in a log cabin pattern. I’m aware that I’m setting myself up for larger and larger pieces each day, the daily time spent growing relentlessly over the year EVEN THOUGH I failed to keep up with just the same small amount of daily stitching last year. But this is Day One so I’m brimming with optimism. It’s going to be a year of COMMIT or DIE TRYING.
On Monday afternoon I took an online workshop on the Quilty Nook (link: The Quilty Nook) with the amazing quilting teacher Heidi Parkes (link: Heidi Parkes) focused on adding texture to your quilts using pintucks and pleats. It turned out to be immensely fun and also maybe has helped me get unblocked on a new line of work I’ve been struggling to find focus with. I immediately realised the potential of this technique for drawing, and Wednesday evening I took a stack of fabric to life drawing club and made some loose contour portraits to try combining my drawing with stitching.
Here’s my first test piece, worked in red sashiko thread on a piece of thrifted cotton bedsheet dyed with tea and iron. This is the pintuck side:
And here’s the pleat side, with its wonderful clots of pooling red in all the tight little corners and cluster points:
Exciting, right? I’ve got around ten more sketches of faces on fabric to work with, plus a few hands and feet. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new method takes me, and of course am already bursting with too many ideas.
With the help of our intern Danielle we patched and painted the front wall of the studio shop and installed these pretty shelves for displaying our prints and broadsides. There are still a few more shelves to go, but this is a good start, and it looks so tidy!
We’re still sorting out the cabinet full of type that came from The Voice of Canadian Serbs, a community newspaper that was once produced on Drouillard Road here in Windsor. This is a fun one, and we have quite a lot of it:
A team of Up The Mesh Count printers is in the studio today working on the posters for the upcoming exhibition, opening at Artspeak Gallery on October 24. Get details here: https://facebook.com/upthemeshcount
We’ve just finished up our last print job for the month, this client-designed poster for some upcoming concerts by local musician Allison Brown. Allison took part in our June session of Up The Mesh Count where she designed the screenprinted red background, and I added the letterpress text afterwards.
Another great session of Up The Mesh Count is in the can, as evidenced by our very full drying rack!
You can see loads of pictures of the workshop and the finished prints at the Up The Mesh Count project page: Up The Mesh Count on Facebook
Last night we printed with the participants of the first series of Up The Mesh Count workshops. Check out some of the prints they made!
Registration for the June sessions opens at noon on June 1. You can keep up-to-date on what’s happening, and see many more photos from the workshops, by visiting the Up The Mesh Count Facebook page.
