2025 daily stitch, day 29

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I think I’ve decided how to make this project work for me over the upcoming year. I’ve been planning to start breaking up the longer chunks into small sections, adding just one section per day so that a single strip may represent a week or two rather than just one day. But while I love the look of long pieced strips in a big log cabin quilt, I’m also very much enjoying the rigid lines created by the folded edges of these applied strips, and don’t fancy the idea of those strips being broken up by folded edges crossing those strips.

30+ years ago when I was a wee baby art student in the Bealart programme (link: Bealart), majoring in printmaking and minoring in textiles, my textile instructor Nicole Crozier called me a “textilian in printmaker’s clothing”. When you see how much I’m currently condensing the footprint of the presses in my printmaking studio to make space for my natural dye operation you’ll probably agree. But still I’m a printmaker first, and we tend to work in multiples. I feel the best way to go forward with this project is to make a new block each month, but finish each off as a separate small quilt rather than waiting until the end of the year to assemble them into one large piece.

This project is about establishing and maintaining a daily practice, not so focused on what the final product will be, and so far this year I haven’t fallen behind once (in stark contrast to last year). I am a champion starter and not much of a finisher, and my projects tend to drag on, and on, and on. Stopping at the end of each month and taking the extra time to finish each block with backing and binding as I go will actually make the daily practice more valuable for me, a person always working on something but rarely finishing anything. And at the end of the year instead of one large quilt top needing to be quilted and finished, I’ll have twelve small finished works. And in 2026 I’ll be able to move on to the next Daily Stitch project with no loose ends.

This means only two more days’ worth of strips on this square and I’ll be ready to quilt it.

home stretch

sleeve

I’ve finally reached the armscye bindoff row on both sleeves of the cabled sweater I’m currently knitting for my partner. The body pieces are finished, so once these sleeve caps are complete it’s just assembly and neck band left to do. This sweater has raglan shaping with a pseudo-saddle shoulder so the rows will get much shorter much faster from here on.

This is the third such sweater I’ve made him, all reverse engineered from his favourite store bought sweater which is all stretched out and shredding apart. The first two, one in a heathered blue and one in brown, were faithful reproductions of that allover cabled sweater. This one has exactly the same basic framework but with a different set of cables, including a central front and back panel of the cable I drafted in 2005, taken from an illustrated page in the Book of Kells, for my first published sweater design at Knitty Magazine (link: Mariah Cardigan).

All three of these have been knit in Wool of the Andes from Knit Picks, which holds up very well to heavy cables yet is a nice discount yarn. We’ve already got enough for a fourth, having lucked into 20 balls of the same yarn in a small town thrift store a while back. It’s a dusty rose colour right now so I’m going to be throwing swatches into all of my dye baths for a while until we find an overdye combination we like, hopefully resulting in a good red, orange, or burgundy shade.

I’ve been out of the knitwear design game for a long time now, not really having been all that good at it, but I’m considering writing up the pattern for this and sharing it here for free, in this one size with notes on scaling up or down.

drinks diary 16 & 17 january 2014

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Ballpoint pen in every colour my beloved Zebra F-301 comes in: black, blue, red, and green. Plus a few markers and yellow highlighter.

The Money Train was a special feature that came around occasionally back when I was working all-night volunteer shifts at the bingo hall on behalf of Artcite, our local artist run centre (link: Artcite Inc). I don’t know if I was ever actually present when the Money Train arrived (if I was, it will turn up in this book eventually) but it features heavily in this sketchbook and the big blue one, both of which I used to bring to the bingo and draw in during our significant chunks of downtime.

This was also a period in our lives when we used to put my partner’s daughter on the Greyhound bus every other Friday to go stay with her mom in another city, and after the bus we’d eat pizza at Terra Cotta (link: Terra Cotta Pizzeria) and share a half litre of red wine. Back then I only had about a 50% chance of getting a migraine from drinking red wine; now it’s more like 100%. And yes, that song lyric is misquoted, whoopsie!

2025 daily stitch, day 13

My hand stitched log cabin is growing nicely.

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It’s already clear that I’m not going to be able to just add strips every day all year to this block. I’ll soon run out of pieces from which to cut such long strips among the fabrics I have earmarked for this. So far it’s all been scraps from the dresses I made during my thesis work, The Wardrobe Project. I’ll switch to some other block printed fabrics when the strips get too long, but adding a strip every day will also make this thing far too big, too unweildy. A year of stitching every day is a lot of stitching so it makes sense that the finished piece be somewhat monumental, but it also has to be manageable.

I’m considering a few different options: making a separate block for each month and assembling them at the end; starting a new centre somewhere else on the backing sheet and then gradually filling in the gaps (tempting but would lessen the impact of the one big log cabin), or having some of the longer strips be made up of smaller sections, thus allowing myself to spend a week or more building up a single strip. None of these is 100% appealing but right now I’m leaning towards the last option. I’ll give myself until the end of January to decide, after I’ve seen the final size of a month of strips.

The back is looking pretty fun, too:

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I’m stitching this with two colours of variegated crochet cotton I picked up in a thrift store. It’s partially a test to see if crochet cotton is strong enough to quilt with (so far I’m leaning towards NO). The twist feels quite different from the sashiko thread I’m more accustomed to using, and I don’t expect it to behave the same way so I’m tying knots rather than relying on the thread to swell and grab itself like sashiko thread does. I sure do love those colour changes though, especially in the orange.

mysteries of the archive

debbring

I’m trying to clear up and consolidate a massive jumble of files and duplicates, the result of several years of just not being careful with how my work was stored on three or more different computers. There’s a lot of stuff like this photo, clearly made by me (the goose is part of an image on a set of old placemats we used to have). But what’s going on here? We may never know.

drinks diary, 11 january 2014

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A dragon tree in a commode and coffee at the Maple Leaf Diner, the one and only time I’ve ever been there (for a meeting with the roller derby league board of directors). I feel like I may have actually drawn that plant in my partner’s office in the library, though, because he used to have a dragon tree in a commode that died when the first covid lockdown happened.

Drawn with all the Zebra F-301 colours: blue, black, red, green.

blue sketchbook, pages 24 & 25

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Red winged blackbirds, male and female, and a giant bird head. This was the first sketch I made while thinking about a design for my chest tattoo. KEEP IT BEAUTIFUL was the slogan on Ontario license plates produced between 1976 and 1982 and I guess it’s about littering on the highways but I’ve always thought it was a good philosophy to live by and I don’t know how many people know where it comes from when they see it on my clavicle.

Ballpoint pen and gesso over top of an older drawing of ballpoint pen and coloured markers.

the worst buck ever

Last week my partner’s sister and her husband spent the night so we could indulge in our favourite sleepover pastime of getting wasted and playing Solo, a weird old German card game my family plays. It’s similar to euchre but your partner changes each hand according to the bidding, and there are funny words derived from Low German for the different bids. Players go out when they reach 36 points, and the game is played until only one person is left, which is called “taking the buck”. I had the worst game of my life, dealt terrible cards and also ending up with the least helpful partners, and at one point well into the game I still had no points and thought, I’d better take a picture of this to show my mom. So here’s a thrilling scoresheet photo for you:

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By the time the game was over and I was declared The Buck, I’d earned points on one hand. I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t, because that would have been a scoresheet worth framing:

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I still might frame it, and hang it behind the kitchen bench where we play cards, because my mom said it was the worst score she’d ever seen. In our family’s heyday there would be three separate tables of Solo going at every holiday gathering, so having any kind of superlative game in this family is kind of amazing.

Don’t tell my mom (hi, yes I’m 53 but just don’t tell my mom, okay) but I’m planning to get knuckle tattoos, in the fancy lettering from the Bicycle Playing Cards box, that say CLUB SOLO, the biggest scoring hand you can get. Even though a couple of my friends have said that everyone will assume it’s some kind of Star Wars reference.