Keeping a record of your days doesn’t have to mean picking up a pen and paper; you can be as
creative as you like
If we say so ourselves, we loved the weather scarf in our February issue (pictured above by Josie George). It seems like an ingenious way both to keep a small record of each day as well as to keep up a hobby. But if you aren’t a natural knitter, you might like to try a different sort of thread journaling.
Look up ‘thread journaling’ on Pinterest and you’ll see hundreds of examples from people who’ve kept an embroidery record of their year. Here’s how it’s done.
What you’ll need
An embroidery hoop
Some cloth (a large napkin is good)
A good collection of differently coloured embroidery threads
Needles, thimbles, embroidery pen and other notions
How to do it
* Think about how you want to record your days. You can do a year (you don’t have to start with January, of course) or just a month or a specific period in your life.
* Sketch out a few ideas on paper for how you’d like your design to work. You could set it out like a calendar grid, present it as a wheel or just go completely higgeldy piggeldy and stitch each day or week’s motif wherever you please.
* Pop your cloth in your hoop and get started. You might like to stitch a motif to represent each day or each week. What you stitch is up to you. You could do a castle or a hill to represent a relevant day out, a cake to represent a party you went to, a pair of curtains for a theatre trip, a flower or vegetable for something you’ve grown in the garden. If you prefer, and have the chops, you could get quite specific - perhaps embroidering something to represent every book you read in a year, or everything you grow in your veg patch this summer.
If you’d like to read more about Josie’s Weather Scarf you can find out all about it on page 108 of our February issue. Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe