Lace and a portrait of a man in front of floral wallpaper. Red and blue ballpoint pen, yellow marker.
found
I’m currently in the thick of a big studio clean and rearrange, carving out a space to set up my indigo and other dye vats in the printmaking studio where there’s beautiful light and ventilation, unlike the dark and cramped laundry area where the dye vats currently reside. Today I moved the two-tier metal flat file unit and am spending some time decluttering the drawers as I move them. I found this great drawing, done *I think* by my friend Monica’s son, from back when I had my shop and public access studio. It appears to be a jewel thief being arrested under a crescent moon by a law enforcement officer who is simultaneously pointing a gun and eating Tic Tacs. Not sure if my favourite part is the fluffy police dog that says “reeef” or the giant ghost of my trusty spray bottle of watered down Simple Green.
As if that weren’t delightful enough, on the flipside is this portrait of me, wearing bright green glasses and a Pugs Not Drugs shirt and drawing a dinosaur. Which is pretty on brand.
Here’s the dinosaur I was drawing:
2025 daily stitch, day 5
I think you can see where this is going.
the fencening
In early December we had a new fence installed out back. It’s a big adjustment after nearly 20 years with a backyard wide open to the alley, and feels weird not to be able to see the alley cats coming (although we’ve left plenty of big gaps for them to pass through, as the feral cat highway cuts through our property from front to back).
Here’s the view from the upstairs window:
Yes, there’s a squirrel hanging on the bird feeder. There is very nearly always a squirrel hanging on the bird feeder.
And the view from the basement studio window:
Every time we plant a tree or put up a new feeder or anything I hover at the window like a hyperactive puppy, waiting to see animals interacting with our new stuff. Fittingly, my girl Shorty was the first one over the fence.
She gave me a little scare recently, not showing up here since December 17 so that I was already starting into the rationalising stage of grief, telling myself she’s pretty old for an urban squirrel (going on 4) and reminding myself this is why we don’t fall in love with wild animals and then she sauntered in here on January 3 and started pigging out on seeds like nothing had happened. I had been about to knock on the door four doors down and ask the residents if a squirrel had died in their roof recently, but since she’s fine please don’t anyone tell my 4-doors-down neighbours that she lives in their roof. She’s lived in that house longer than they have.
blue sketchbook, page 20 & 21
Ballpoint pen, markers, white gel pen. Portrait of a random stranger, from their social media profile picture.
I remember drawing this page while working the midnight sessions at the bingo, listening to the ladies who ran bingos for various charities talking about the city’s cracking down on how many charities each of them could volunteer for. It was stupid and short sighted but, welcome to Windsor.
blue sketchbook, pages 18 & 19
Ballpoint pen, blue highlighter marker, and crusty ancient Letraset letters. Everything else is bleed through from the preceding and following pages.
I drew this little cartoon of José Mourinho after one of his whiny press conferences where he accused the match officials of bias against his team, muttering “por qué, por qué” while shaking his head and rolling his eyes around. It may have been after the 5-0 defeat to FC Barcelona on Matchday 13 of the 2010/11 season, or after some other time Barça beat them. At one of those matches around that time, a Barça fan in the crowd help up a sign that said MOURINHO, HOY, MAÑANA, Y SIEMPRE: TRADUCTOR and I’m still laughing about it.
daily stitch 2025, day one
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:
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.
birthday dress
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.
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!