2025 – Winter Jumpstart – Intro

Slow stitching

Winter can be a difficult time to maintain your motivation to create, with cold dark days, and an uninviting sewing room. The Winter Jumpstart is a challenge intended to encourage you to do something creative every day for 31 days, supported by other like-minded people. We hope it will inspire you to try something new and to develop positive working habits.

Hand stitching is perfect for cold winter days – you can do it in warmth and comfort – and we hope you’ll join us for 31 days of slow meditative stitching. Hand stitch can really elevate a quilt by adding design elements, emphasising features of the quilt, or providing texture, and many textile artists are incorporating hand stitching into their work.

For the first 12 days of August we’ll post a stitch a day. You’ll be very familiar with some of them, but we’ll suggest variations you could try and ways to use them that may be new to you. For the final 19 days we’d like you to choose the stitches you enjoyed working with the most and hand sew a small piece that showcases the stitches.

We’ll give you instructions for the day’s stitch with photos of samples and ways in which we have used them in quilts, or ideas for how they could be used. We’d like you to experiment with the stitches – maybe distort them, stitch left-handed, stitch blind folded or stitch from the back. We’ll suggest needles and threads to use and anything else you may need to complete the stitch.

If you have used any of the stitches in your previous work, we’d love you to post pictures and talk about why you like using the particular stitch.

If hand stitching isn’t for you but you would like to join the Jumpstart for the encouragement it provides, you are welcome to sign up and work on your own project. We’ll post a word each day to inspire you if you don’t have a particular project in mind and we hope you will post photos of what you’ve done each day.

So, gather whatever you’ll need so you are ready to start stitching on 1 August. For hand stitching you’ll need fabric suitable for stitch sampling (strengthened with interface if you like something firm to stitch on, or even make some quilt layers), threads of various weights, needles to suit the various thread weights, and a hoop if you like to use one,

Please go to the Aotearoa Quilters website to sign up.