Author: Jodi Green

daily stitch 2025, day one

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This is the beginning of my 2025 daily stitch project.

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.

books I read in 2024

1. Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
2. Linden McIntyre, The Bishop’s Man
3. Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
4. Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
5. Yasmina Khadra, The Attack
6. Frances Kazan, Halide’s Gift
7. Thrity Umrigar, The World We Found
8. Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man
9. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
10. Nell Zink, Mislaid
11. Giles Milton, Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan
12. Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child
13. Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean
14. Matthew Kneale, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance
15. Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
16. William Gibson, Neuromancer
17. William Gibson, The Peripheral
18. Jessica Johns, Bad Cree
19. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
20. Richard Wagamese, Starlight
21. Craig Shreve, The African Samurai
22. Nazanine Hozar, Aria
23. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
24. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit
25. Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth
26. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome and other stories
27. CS Richardson, The End of the Alphabet
28. Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
29. Carol Shields, The Collected Stories
30. John Vaillant, The Jaguar’s Children
31. Jane Urquhart, Storm Glass
32. Mark Haddon, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
33. Louise Erdrich, The Round House
34. Bairbre Tóibín, The Rising
35. Thomas King, Medicine River
36. Timothy Findley, Spadework
37. Anne Rice, Angel Time
38. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
39. Mary Lawson, Road Ends
40. Lydia Kwa, The Walking Boy
41. Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
42. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
43. Irene Zabytko, The Sky Unwashed
44. Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key

pintucks + pleats

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:

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And here’s the pleat side, with its wonderful clots of pooling red in all the tight little corners and cluster points:

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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.

birthday dress

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I’ve been slammed lately with a big bookbinding commission that I just finished up, but found a bit of time to sew up a new dress for my birthday, a newish tradition. I cut into the good linen with an untested pattern but it worked out okay.

This is a shortened version of the Skyline Dress by Syd Graham (buy the pattern here: Etsy link). I eliminated the bottom tier and lengthened the top tier, and also made the straps fixed instead of adjustable (because the adjustability relies on a bow tied over one shoulder blade, which I know from experience isn’t something I’m going to enjoy wearing). It’s drafted for someone a bit taller than me and on my next one I’ll shorten the bodice. I may go back and shorten it on this version as well.

This is handkerchief weight linen that I dyed with willow leaves and iron. It’s not as drab as it looks in the photos but still pretty drab and I may end up dyeing it again. Worn on my birthday as above, overtop of an ecoprinted cotton gauze Yesterday Dress by Caramiya Maui (shop link: Caramiya Maui) and my indigo dyed toile skirt that I made from an old dress that used to belong to my late mother in law.

Here’s how I wore it again the next day, much more rumpled, over leggings and a safety orange Slocan Tank by Helen’s Closet (shop link: Helen’s Closet). Yeah, I pose the same way every day, I guess.

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Overall I’m happy with the relaxed fit and layerability of this and I’ll definitely make it again. I’m already planning a long tiered patchwork version, and will try the short version next time with a trapezoidal skirt instead of a rectangle. I feel a binge coming on!

blue sketchbook pages 16 & 17

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Howdy friends, it’s been a while!

Here’s another spread from that blue sketchbook. Ballpoint pen, white gel pen, and colour markers of varying quality. Those floating rings reminded me of meat, mac, & cheese, something with which I had a sick fascination as a kid but which I have never eaten (because, ew).

“Peking Duck in Lotus Land” was the title of a painting by an unknown Chinese artist, one of a small collection that were for sale in a gallery I used to work at in the late 90s. The painting depicted a line of ducks zigzagging along a winding river between giant lotus plants and I desperately wanted it but couldn’t afford it because I was in my 20s and working several part-time jobs. I still regret not buying it but, oh well.

blue sketchbook pages 14 & 15

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A droopy eyebird, a gold lamé doughnut explosion in space, and a super sheen comet.

Ballpoint pen, markers, gesso, metallic gold paint pen, old wooden thread spool label.

Up in the attic I have a big sparkly round gold lamé tablecloth with a single cigarette burn in it, given to me 25 years ago by my cousin Chris back when he was working for a party rental company. I’ve been hanging onto it all this time waiting for the perfect project. Throwing it on as a cape and going as Rick Wakeman for Hallowe’en has always been high on my mental list of options, but my hair is all wrong and also, I can’t play piano.

the kitchenening: part ten

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We have tile. I’m falling into a swoon over here.

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And just like that, the colour of the countertop we chose finally makes sense. Even knowing the green tile was coming, living in this unfinished kitchen for the past month I’ve been willing myself not to hate the countertop because of how uninspiring it has looked next to the cold white primed drywall. Against the green it’s suddenly beautiful, and I love it.

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Having lived here for a month now, we’re completely rethinking this wall opening, and are now pretty sure about what we’ll build to fill in this space: a midcentury style wooden divider, the kind with upright dowels or spindles going through small shelves. Peter’s mother’s house had one just inside the front door, providing a screen to set the entryway off from the living room, and I’ve always wanted to incorporate one into our house. It certainly took us long enough to think of it but now that we have, it’s pretty obviously the perfect solution. We’ve been enjoying having the visual and conversational link between the two rooms, but more importantly, shelves are better suited to our maximalist decor sensibilities. And all those ceramic frogs have got to go *somewhere*.

blue sketchbook pages 10 & 11

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Mycelium everywhere, branching on the right and a worm-shaped spiral on the left, with a horned bird.

Ballpoint pen, markers, gesso, bingo dabber. Page 11 is a two-strip newsprint bingo card tipped into the book to create a new page. I used to collect and bring home all the cards our club paid out on during my volunteer shift at the bingo; some of them wound up in my mixed paper junk journals (my perennial bestselling item) and some travelled in my bag to Spanish class to get doodled on.