Daily Stitch 2024

Since January 1st, 2024, artists Jodi Green and Lisa Sylvestre have individually been engaged in a daily stitch project.

Recording the passage of a day, every day is a personal practice that offers time for contemplative and slow work. Though the work of each day is small, the cumulative visual impact of recorded days is striking.

Jodi and Lisa worked together to determine the parameters of their 2024 projects: plans to work daily, ideas around the amount of time to be spent stitching on a daily basis, and types of materials to be included.

In practice, their individual projects developed with marked differences. Each day, Lisa’s daily stitch (image top left) was in direct response to the previous day. Indeed, the events of many days are easily identified based on stitch design decisions in her piece. In contrast, Jodi’s daily stitch (image top right) quite simply marks the passing of each day. While there is no means to differentiate one day from another in her piece, the movement of time is clear. Days accumulate, as days do, into weeks and months and years.

Daily Stitch 2025

Jodi and Lisa often worked together on their 2024 daily stitches and were aware of each other’s struggles and satisfactions with the project throughout the year. It was important, as 2025 approached, to step back for an overall evaluation as they considered how and even if the project would continue.

For each of them, finding a literal daily rhythm of stitching proved elusive. It was often necessary to play catch-up as unstitched days piled up. In those catch-up times, the daily meditative aspect was lost, but the overall commitment to the project’s completion delivered its own satisfaction.

Enter 2025. A decision was taken at the end of 2024 to continue with the daily stitch but without collaborative planning. As the early weeks of a new year have become a sacred time of rest for both Jodi and Lisa, it felt correct to let their new projects evolve slowly. Good rest and the slow passage of time allow for new perspectives, for thoughtful planning and decision making.

Enter Mending. When the time came to gather and share their early progress on their 2025 daily stitch projects, they discovered considerable overlap. As both Jodi and Lisa strive for sustainability in their studios and indeed, in their lives, it is perhaps not surprising that mending became the inspiration for both of them in these new works.

In an effort to bring sustainable practice more to the forefront in the Daily Stitch project, Jodi’s project for 2025 focuses on hand mending existing pieces that have been in her possession for decades: two skirts, each made using precious handed down fabric that is more than 50 years old. 

The first skirt project (image above) is a fragile cotton toile, made from a dress that once belonged to a family member, that is slowly being covered with a pattern of stitches using the Japanese sashiko method, intended to fortify the fabric against wear and preserve it a little longer from breaking down due to its age and continued wearing. As these strengthening stitches travel across the surface of the fabric, tiny holes already forming in the fabric are being patched and mended. 

The second skirt will piece together fragments of a collection of gauzy Indian cotton dresses, some handed down, others purchased secondhand in the 1980s and worn to shreds. These will be painstakingly patched together and stitched onto a backing fabric for stability, and strengthened with a layer of mending stitches. The process of tearing down and reconstructing bits of garments that contain much of her history is a reflection of her decades of printmaking studio practice of tearing down and reconstructing old work into new, and gives extra meaning to the meditative practice of mending and remaking.

Lisa’s 2025 project centres on mending a beloved coat. The coat, a Lichen Duster from the Sew Liberated pattern collection, was constructed by her, several years ago, from a double cotton gauze which is now shredding. Spot patching had been a sufficient method until recently when it was ascertained that the entire coat would need to be reinforced. Lisa decided to combine the rebuilding of the coat with the daily stitch.

Ideally, each day, a new patch made from studio fabric remnants is to be added to the coat and at the end of the year, an entirely new layer will extend the life of this piece for years to come. The choosing of the fabric remnants has been a suprisingly satisfying aspect of this project as echos of past projects work their way into this piece. Once again, the daily ritual aspect is proving elusive. Rather, constructing and attaching an entire line of new patches in one sitting is proving to be the way this project is proceeding.

Jodi Green (Levigator Press) and Lisa Sylvestre (asil) will present the Mending Room, an annual pop-up exhibit and workshop series at ArtSpeak gallery, 1942 Wyandotte St. E , Windsor from September 22nd through September 27, 2025 where these in-progress pieces will be on display. See the Mending Room tab for detailed information.