As a kind of successor to 2024 in insomnia, in 2025 I've been keeping track of where my girlfriend and I sleep, and how many kids we have custody of at the time. The data is fairly simple (1-2 sleep locations, 0-5 kids for each night), and a lot of it is largely predictable, so the challenge for me has been to do it on a garment (a long-sleeved blouse from a secondhand store), and to represent it in a different pattern of stitches for each month.

Where I sleepPermalink

To make it easy to start, January is literally set up as a calendar with weeks starting on Sunday, using trellis stitch. The tacking stitch in the upper left corner of each day is where my girlfriend and I slept; if we slept in different places, there are two stitches (purple for my apartment, light green for hers). If kids were also spending the night, they appear as French knots inside the box for that day.

I was pleased with how the sleep data was coming along, but realized that the back of the blouse felt very empty. I decided to fill it with Japanese darning stitch (which reminded me of hourglasses), and use one of those stitches for each day of the year as a container for data about communication with my ex. Every French knot represents one text message, and every chain stitch represents 50 words of email. For multi-paragraph text messages, each gets a knot. Separate email threads are represented as new lines, but long threads can snake around. Messages from him are in brown, mine are in purple. This has been extremely cathartic: rather than immediately getting annoyed at (long) messages, I add it to a spreadsheet for embroidering.