Your Guide to Doing Winter with The Fabled Thread

Every year, when the temperatures creep up, we start waiting for them to come back down again, for that first morning with a chill in the air, the first evening you notice it getting dark, the first time you leave the house and think actually, maybe I need a coat today.

Because this is the good bit, the season when staying in is a perfectly legitimate plan. When every walk can reasonably end in a hot chocolate, when you can cook things slowly, light candles ridiculously early, and spend the whole afternoon sewing to your heart's content.

If you're feeling the pull towards introducing more “analogue” activities into your life, we’ve put together this guide for where to begin if you want to get into sewing this winter. And we've also written previously about the benefits of making life more analogue, which you can read here, and we also explain why we believe getting offline is essential for creativity here.

Ultimately, there are real advantages to loosening our grip on digital media a little. Life feels noticeably calmer when you can focus on one thing at a time without constant interruptions. You start to rediscover the quiet pleasure of slower things.

There’s also something rather lovely about becoming so absorbed in what you’re doing that you forget to document it. Spending time on a project purely for your own enjoyment, with no audience and no expectation attached. Left alone with your thoughts for a while, you might even find a bit of deeper thinking - or simply the sort of mental rest that feels increasingly rare.

And then there’s the simple pleasure of working with your hands. Physical materials naturally pull you away from screens and back into the tactile world - which, if I’m honest, is one of the reasons I picked up embroidery in the first place.

If you’re coming back to sewing after a break, there are many things you can do to reignite the stitching spark. You can choose a kit with new stitches you haven’t tried before, or take it easy with a beginner kit to rebuild your familiarity with sewing.

The first thing to decide before choosing your project is whether you want something that totally absorbs you or something you can do to unwind, that is meditative but doesn’t take too much concentration.

This brings us to the next step: understanding what an embroidery project can give you, compared to what you’ll get from a needlepoint kit.

With embroidery and needlepoint, you don’t need lots of materials, you don’t need lots of time, you don’t need lots of space, and importantly, you don’t need lots of skill. From day one, you can start making something to be proud of.