The Independent Stitch

Sweater archaeology: navy blue wool, chunky

Every fall, I get to rediscover the navy blue wool sweater. This week I've worn it several times, while outdoors walking the dogs, either without a jacket or with a windproof shell over it. On the coldest days of the coming winter, it will become the most important layer in an upper-body warming sequence that runs through silk camisole, turtleneck, blue sweater, puffy winter jacket.

The sweater has evoked compliments yet again this year: “Gee, that's a great sweater!” people have already volunteered.

When I say, “I love it. I made it more than thirty years ago and it's still going strong,” the eyebrows rise in disbelief.

“Wow. It looks new.”

The navy blue sweater—and a couple of others that I still wear with equal pleasure—has moved around the country with me. It has outlasted two marriages. It’s got a few pills, but not enough to care about. That’s more than can be said for some more recent knits that I've already taken the sharp, pill-nipping scissors to.

Moving around, just part of life for so many of us, fragments relationships. I often think of friends that I wish I could still see regularly, could even stay in touch with. They are scattered across North America, both the U.S. and Canada, and a few are in Europe and Asia, and a couple may be in Africa. I know where some of them are. Now and then I have time to connect briefly and they have time to connect back. I've lost track of others. Every decade or so, as a result of a reunion effort put together by a school or college, I catch a scrap of news about people I'm glad to align with again, even if temporarily.

Of course I make new friends in each place. I can't even keep up with everyone I know in this city, yet I still miss good friends from other places so much it sometimes hurts. This past Sunday morning as I woke up, I felt that particular, natural pain to an unusual degree and for no particular reason I could identify.

It's true that some of my good friends in this place are retiring and looking at where they will move for the next phases of their lives. They are still here and we're in frequent contact. I remind myself that now is what matters. Others have already gone, relocating for love or work or just because. I think of people in many states and provinces that I’d love to have a cup of tea with today. It’s not possible.

Each of us lives where we are, of course, but bits of my heart end up permanently attached to people and places that are now out of easy reach. Because I haven’t done well at staying in touch, although I make an effort when I can, I feel a twinge of melancholy when I think of them.

This sweater is no tour de force of knitting. It's simply a handmade garment that comforts me outside and in when I wear it. Oddly, when I put it on I feel closer to all those folks I miss. In many cases, I wore this sweater when I could see them regularly—whether that was in the Northwest, the Northeast, or any of the other places I've lived or visited since I turned this piece of potential (yarn) into reality (garment).

That's a long time ago. My best guess is that this sweater was on my needles somewhere between 1973 and 1975, which makes it between thirty-one and thirty-three years old.

When I made this particular sweater, I lived in Port Townsend, Washington, and was married to J. I don't recall having used a pattern. Although the first sweater I ever made was patternless and successful, it took a number of years for me to feel comfortable working without patterns—to get past that sense of beginner's luck and to work without the minimal but crucial advice offered by a college roommate and a yarn-store owner, both of whom launched me and then left me alone. I have also always used, and still use, patterns to learn new things about knitting.

But I think this sweater may be an original design. If that's the case, I wonder where I was in my knitting history and how I felt my way into designing it, because I certainly didn't have the experience or resources that I now have. Several great books that have guided many people to leave patterns behind hadn't been published yet! A couple had been, and they were wonderful. . . . More on that later, though. I've looked at those books and this sweater differs enough from their specific techniques that I don't see their influence.

This sweater is a raglan, a style that I currently tend to skip over. I only figured out later how narrow my shoulders are in comparison to other people’s. From the visual standpoint, a raglan doesn't help balance a narrow-shouldered body. If you care about that sort of thing.

I should make another raglan, though. As it turns out, two of my thirty-year favorite sweaters are raglans. One, knitted in a lace pattern from light-blue worsted-weight yarn, is beginning to wear out.

This one, amazingly, looks like it came off the needles a few weeks ago despite the fact that I have worn it not only to walk dogs (for decades) but to split and stack many cords of firewood. I made it from a very thick wool, medium navy with very small amounts of green and yellow well mixed in. The yarn looks like a four-ply—perhaps one of the reasons it has held up so well despite its bulky size. The fabric is ever-so-slightly felted, so I don't want to pick apart a strand to seriously analyze the structure.

I made this sweater just about the time I started spinning, but before I’d made my first handspun sweater (white Romney, ribbed all over, cardigan with a shawl collar; gone to a clothing donation after about twenty years . . .  another story, or maybe three). The gauge is 2.3 stitches and 3 rows to the inch (9.2 stitches and 12 rows / 4 inches or 10 cm). The finished sweater weighs 1.75 pounds (800 g). Chunky!

In its way, this sweater is as simple as the baby caps I've been knitting for Caps to the Capitol.

I look it over carefully, to see if I can determine exactly how I constructed it and if that will help me remember more about how it came into being. I know I bought the yarn in Port Townsend, after the little knitting shop opened. That shop stocked fantastic yarn: I am still wearing three sweaters from yarn I found there. I moved away in 1977.

I worked this sweater in the round. I usually work in the round, and have done so since sweater number 1, which I made in 1966 or 1967 in Northfield, Minnesota. I don’t have that sweater any more. Although I made it for myself and wish I still had it, I gave it to J. I hope he loved it.

There are 100 stitches in the body and 30 in each sleeve (the sweater is 43 inches [109 cm] around the chest). There's a three-inch band of ribbing at the bottom of the body and each sleeve. The ribbing is k3, p2, with a small twisted rib worked on the first two stitches of the k3, twisting on the first and then every third round, for 9 rounds. Then I changed to plain stockinette and worked the body for 15 inches (38 cm) from its cast-on and the sleeves for 17 inches (43.2 cm) from their cast-on (yes, the sleeves are worked straight—no increases).

At each underarm, I put 6 stitches on holders: 3 on either side of the underarm marker on each sleeve and on either side of the side-seam markers on the body.

Then I joined the body and sleeves into one big circle, with four markers in place, one at each intersection between sleeve stitches and body stitches. I knitted 6 rounds plain before I began the raglan decreases. I worked the decreases on every other round, on the 2nd and 3rd stitches before and after the stitch markers: each raglan decrease line is a nice, broad, four-stitch “panel” running diagonally toward the neck. There are 11 decrease rounds . . . and I ran out of stitches to “lose” on the sleeves, so I decreased out the two stitches on the sleeve portion of the “panel.”

I ended up with 22 stitches each on the front and back, for 44 stitches in all. Because the neckline finish required 45 stitches (9 repeats of the k3, p2 ribbing that I used on the bottom edges), I fudged in an extra stitch. I'm not interested in finding it.  I'm just interested in looking at what I accomplished. If I were going to make this sweater again, I'd re-invent that fudged stitch when I needed it, maybe in a better way than I did thirty years ago.

At the neckline, I worked the k3, p2 ribbing again. On the front (or back; they're interchangeable), a k3 rib flows up uninterrupted from the remaining stitches of each shoulder's raglan “panel.” (The other shoulder on this side of the sweater has the same match between raglan line and ribbing. And it's hard to believe those wide purl bits are only 2 stitches wide, but it's true.)

On the back (or front, if I've put the sweater on the other way around . . . it's as forgiving in the wearing as it was in the knitting), a p2 rib is centered on the 22 stitches.

I worked a long stretch of ribbing: 4.5 inches (11.5 cm). Then I cast off, folded it to the inside, and very loosely sewed the cast-off edge to the base of the ribbing. I joined the 6-stitch sets I’d reserved at each underarm, washed the sweater and laid it flat on towels to dry, and it was done.

I normally think that I figured out how to do pattern-flow elements, like the symmetries of the neckline ribbing in this garment, much later, although examination of another sweater from the same era suggests that I've been interested in having the dance of the stitches fit the music of the composition for longer than I recall.

In the final analysis, I am not sure how I came up with the design for this sweater. It doesn't match the techniques or ideas in the books that I know I had available at the time. If there was a pattern, I don't remember it . . . and I do know where I got the patterns for the two other sweaters I still wear that I knitted during that time.

For the moment, the navy blue sweater's genesis remains slightly mysterious. If anyone recognizes a possible simple raglan ancestor from the early 1970s, one that has these details, I'd be interested in hearing about it and seeing if I might have come across that item. Most of my reading came from the newsstands. Mon Tricot collections were my favorites. They tended to have more complex designs than this!

Despite the lack of information about its origins, the sweater's presence in my life is completely straightforward. It’s here. It keeps me warm. People say nice things to me when I wear it.

I bury my nose in the fabric—it's one of those fiber-people impulses, like reaching out to touch someone else's handknitted garment. My nose is surrounded with the complex of aromas that I connect with commercial wool—a little dry, a little far from the sheep. There's a sweetness to handspun yarn that is missing here. The hand of the fabric is a bit crisp, too. Handspun from well-prepared fiber feels bouncy. But this sweater completely embodies essence-of-wool, something acrylic will never manage.

At 8 on that quiet Sunday morning in early fall, I turned the clocks back and it was 7 again. Wispy white clouds streaked the blue sky. The cottonwoods and poplars still bore half their complement of goldy-brown leaves; the other half had dropped down to cover the ground and had turned all the way brown. Getting ready to walk the dogs, I pulled on my almost-as-good-as-new, more-than-thirty-year-old navy blue sweater. The only place it may show any sign of wear is in the underarm seams, where some of the stitches gap apart a little. I think those seams may have been a touch loose since I first joined them.

As I pulled the sweater over my head and it settled around my shoulders, arms, and torso, I felt calmer than when I woke up and very much at home, as if I were in the company not of memories but of old friends who have known my faults for long enough to love me anyway—the ones who understand both my fumbling and my finesse.

Progress on caps; digression about baby blankets

While I was lying low with a cold, I started knitting baby caps for Caps to the Capitol. My knitting time is usually spent testing and editing patterns, or exploring techniques that I am curious about that ultimately end up as part of the publishing and/or writing worlds I inhabit.

It's been nice to knit these caps. They're sure fast! On a trip to Denver on Wednesday for a meeting of the Colorado Authors' League, I made four. I now have a total of twelve, all knitted from leftover yarn: four peach variegated, four brown variegated, and four in shades of blue, mostly solid with a little variegation thrown in.

I've also gotten past "charge the battery" on using this camera, although I don't have any sense of control over the quality of the images yet. The bear is a friend of the family who lives on our couch. Technically, it belongs to my daughter, but I get to enjoy it, too.

My cap process is this: I cast on and knit the ribbing for one cap, then move it to the larger needle and cast on for a second cap on the smaller needle, using a different ball of yarn. I can choose between stockinette (on the larger needle) or ribbing (on the smaller), depending on whim. That, and the different colors, keeps the process a bit more interesting that it might be otherwise and I'm churning out caps without paying much attention.

The brown and peach variegated yarns originally came into my possession because I was designing baby blankets for a collection that Leisure Arts put together to accompany Debbie Macomber's novel The Shop on Blossom Street. (There's also a collection to go with Debbie's other knitting-related title, A Good Yarn, but I concentrated on the baby blankets.)

The deadline was tight and pieces had to be made with yarns made by companies that were members of the Craft Yarn Council of America. Each pattern only needed to be represented by a swatch, sketch, and instructions, not a completed item. I still had to buy all the yarns to swatch with, of course!  I designed four projects in as many weeks (in addition to regular work), three of which were chosen for the final collection. Other people, recruited by Leisure Arts, knitted the sample blankets that are shown in the publication.

Each blanket coordinated with a character in the book. Along with the regular material, I sent in descriptions of how and why a character had knitted each blanket (each selected blanket got associated in print with the "right" character, although the stories in the book aren't the ones I sent).

For this blanket, I set myself the challenge of designing a fabric that used two variegated yarns and looked good. Just to see if I could. I was thinking about young knitters and the appeal of variegated yarn and what a kick it could be to watch two different ones changing colors throughout the work. Of course, it would be really easy to produce something that looked awful from yarns that look cool by themselves.

Whatever I came up with needed to be simple to knit, too.

I chose two variegated yarns that I thought would have enough contrast to "read" consistently as dark and light in a pattern. I ended up using Barbara Walker's "Bricks" pattern (A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, page 62 in my edition and probably also in the new edition, called A First Treasury of Knitting Patterns).

There's only one color in each row.

Leisure Arts called this one "Alix's Chocolate Petits Fours." I don't remember whether I did, too. I might have. I've lost my files (hard-drive crash). Here's the version I knitted later, because I felt very unfinished about the projects, having only taken them to the point where they were ready to knit:

Although one yarn is "light" and one is "dark," the lightest color in the dark yarn and the darkest color in the light yarn are almost identical. When these bits coincided, they produced interesting effects that didn't destroy the design because they didn't last long.

The project looks a whole lot more complex than it is! The same is true of the other two designs of mine that are in this publication.

One that they called "Lydia's Lacy Blocks" used a bulky, fuzzy yarn—a pseudo-mohair. The original was a sea-green color (I don't like typical "baby" colors), although it's shown in the book in pale yellow. The pattern was Barbara Walker's "Lace Check" (also from the first Treasury, page 191 in my edition). The trickiest part was getting the simple border (of 3-stitch by 4-row blocks) to line up with the inside pattern so that the instructions would be simple and everything would come out even at the end. This is an easy introduction to lace.

The blanket in this set that was the biggest kick to design was called "A Lesson on Color" by the time it got into print. It uses four BRILLIANT tones of a sport-weight microfiber yarn: purple, lime, turquoise, and coral. The pattern, called "Tilting Blocks," is from Walker's A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. I worked it with the plain blocks in stockinette (Walker shows it with garter blocks and mentions the stockinette option).

What's cool about this pattern is that the lace blocks are worked with different types of decreases that pull the fabric in alternating directions, so that both lace and stockinette blocks look like they are set at different angles and all the outside edges end up zigzagged. Crochet around the finished piece and you've got what looks like a scalloped edging on all four sides.

I don't even have the swatches to show, of course. And the only full blanket I knitted was the first, made after the deadlines were all past.

And now its remainders are turning into baby caps. Four each from the blanket's two partial leftover variegated skeins.

The designing of those blankets was great fun. Knitting the caps is more satisfying. I might need to knit the other two blankets start-to-finish some time, just to complete the thought process with action.

The fourth blanket I designed? They didn't include it, and I know why. I used the brown variegated yarn, worked in a texture that felt to me like tree bark only of course soft, and finished it with a border of chenille-like dark green. It felt very woodsy. I thought it was fun, but it would not have photographed well. And it was perhaps a too oddly colored for a baby blanket! Although I think some babies would love it.

Designing it did get me thinking along the lines that led to the blanket shown above.

I still have leftover dark green yarn, of course, because all I knitted with it was a large swatch.

I wonder whether it would make a nice baby cap? Or four?

Arctic Lace blog tour here today!

Welcome to day 2 of the three-week blog tour for Donna Druchunas' new book, Arctic Lace: Knitting Projects and Stories Inspired by Alaska's Native Knitters. Each stop on the tour has a personality and flavor that's as individual as the hosting blog, which makes the sequence a lot of fun. The tour started yesterday at Designer’s Note.

Because I'm the editor and publisher of Arctic Lace, we're reversing the expected roles today. Donna is interviewing me.

You might want to get a cup of tea. I'd bring you one if I could. This is a long post. Donna asks good questions, and I answer in some detail.

For background, here’s the table of contents of Arctic Lace:

• Introduction: Following my obsessions to the  Arctic
• 1 Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers' Co-operative
• 2 The Yup'ik and Inupiat People
• 3 Villages and Knitters
• 4 Musk oxen in Alaska
• 5 A new venture: The beginning of the co-op
• 6 Qiviut
• 7 Lace-knitting workshop
• 8 Projects
• 9 Designing your own projects

Notes on the projects: Donna's designs for the Arctic Lace projects were inspired by images from Alaskan life and history that she discovered through her own research and travels. The designs used by the knitters of Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers' Co-operative are copyrighted, because the knitters depend on their original work as a source of income to supplement their primarily subsistence lifestyles. (Visit the Oomingmak site, or better yet the store in Anchorage, to buy an heirloom piece of Native Alaskan knitting!) Arctic Lace contains fifteen of Donna's designs, varying in difficulty. Most have been designed to require small amounts of luxury fibers; information on substituting fibers is included.

Donna: As a publisher, what made you interested in publishing Arctic Lace when I first told you about it?

Deb: I'm a handspinner and have been since the early 1970s. I've known about qiviut, and heard about the Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers' Co-operative, for decades. When I was editor of Spin-Off, I had the opportunity to publish excellent articles on qiviut, and the magazine had published some information before I got there.

I thought the topic was fascinating and I knew what information had already been printed. A lot of the story had not been told. What information did exist was scattered.

Donna: This book is almost two books in one, with extensive history and background chapters followed by knitting lessons and patterns. Were there any special challenges in producing a dual-personality book like this? Would you consider publishing two-part books like this again in the future?

Deb: Yes, there were major challenges, and yes, I would consider publishing books like this again—even though anyone who knows contemporary publishing well will tell someone who's thinking about releasing a dual-personality book not to do it.

Although there is precedent for doing so in some books that have become classics, those books were released under different marketing conditions. Now that many more books are being released—and the channels through which they are being distributed have become more strictly funneled into categories—the dual-personality book doesn’t fit the system. That’s why The Physics of Star Trek often gets filed under "physics," where Trekkies are far less likely to find it than if it were with the Star Trek books. Only the independent bookstores seem to be able to file a single book in two sections any more.

However, I couldn't imagine separating the parts of this book. So, with our eyes open, we proceeded to make the book we both envisioned—one that actually has more than two aspects, because it contains the human context and history, the ecological/biological background on musk oxen, the qiviut information, the lace-knitting primer, the patterns, and the design-your-own templates.

Donna: As an editor, do you prefer editing books that contain mainly knitting instructions or mainly prose? Why?

Deb: Prose!

Although I enjoy editing knitting instructions in the same way that I enjoy assembling certain types of jigsaw puzzles, it's almost impossible to get a group of knitting patterns into print with instructions that are unambiguous and error-free. It doesn't matter how hard you work. Publishing knitting instructions is like running a marathon and a hurdles course at the same time . . . in a hail storm.

I have edited one knitting pattern in my life that was perfect when I received it. That's one out of a lot of knitting patterns. The whole time that pattern was in production, I was anxious that a typo would sneak in and spoil it. (Hint: Spin-Off for Winter 1996.)

Computers have been a great boon to publishing, but they also have increased the chances that random typographic events will occur after the proofing has been completed—and a random typographic event produces an error of either commission or omission in knitting instructions. I only began to relax about that project after I had eyeballed it one more time, character by character, when we got the desk copies from the printer.

At the same time, conveying knitting information through the printed page requires that we use knitting patterns. We knitters can't always sit next to each other in a circle and explain things over cups of tea. Although knitters now have access to videos and other tools, and they're incredibly useful, I don't find them as portable and friendly as books and magazines. So we'll just have to keep dealing with knitting patterns.

Donna: Arctic Lace includes photographs from many different sources, including digital photos, black-and-white film photos, scans of printed photos, and files provided in several different sizes and formats from museums. How did you get all of these different types of photos to look good?

Deb: First, thanks to you for gathering so many incredible images for us to work with from so many different sources.

After that, all of the credit for making them look great in print goes to my daughter, Rebekah Robson-May. She has brought indispensable image-processing skills to the publishing of Knitting in the Old Way, Spinning in the Old Way, and now Arctic Lace. Each of those books has presented different difficulties in its images, although Arctic Lace was the most demanding in the diversity of types and qualities of photos that we, and therefore she, needed to work with.

So my short answer to "how did you get the photos to look good" is "Rebekah"!

In college, one of her work-study jobs involved processing photos from Mars research. The skills she taught herself there transfer well to publishing. She has also taught herself web design and has created, and now maintains, our web site and several others.

I am not entirely sure of everything Rebekah does when she processes the images that we end up printing—although she has taught me a handful of rather sophisticated Photoshop tricks that let me do some image manipulation when she isn't available—and I do know that she is still not completely satisfied with two of the images as they appeared in print.

On the other hand, there was one image that I thought was hopeless, and we didn’t have an alternative. Because of the lack of contrast, it looked overall gray. She improved it beyond my wildest dreams.

The most challenging images may have been those that were shot at resolutions too low for reproduction in books (but which we wanted to use anyway) and those that showed items that we wanted to silhouette (so just the object floats on the page) but that were photographed so the background and object were difficult to isolate either electronically or visually.

Donna: I love the final cover for Arctic Lace because it features both the lace itself and knitters from the Oomingmak co-op. Before we ended up with that cover, we had several other designs that weren't quite working, most of which featured a photo of a musk ox. Can you describe the process of working with a cover designer and how you came up with the final design?

Deb: Cover design is critical for any book that will be sold to people who are browsing, whether in person or on the internet. I do almost all the design work at Nomad Press, including the books' interiors, because I love type and I love integrating text and visuals. I do not design the covers, even though that's an expensive piece of work to hire out and there aren't many cover designers whose work I think is appropriate for what we're doing.

The cover needs to convey the idea of a book in an appealing way that needs to "read" both at a physical browsing distance of six feet, like in a yarn shop or bookstore, and when reduced to about a one-inch (2.5 cm) square on a web page.

A good cover designer is a treasure. The cover of Arctic Lace was designed by the talented and dedicated Mayapriya Long at Bookwrights.

The process began with selection of a title. We also collected a group of images that we liked and thought Mayapriya would find visually interesting. I also talked with Mayapriya about the audience for the book, its trim size, and what was important to convey in this particular cover design.

Our initial designs for the Arctic Lace cover faced several challenges. Chief among them was the difficulty of designing anything with a qiviut-like brown that would reproduce well on press. The gamut of colors available from current printing technology seems infinite but is not. After many attempts, we decided not to risk having the wrong brown appear and shifted to gray, which conveyed the feeling of the qiviut more reliably.

The initial array of ideas involved sets of fabric swatches, some great ice crystal patterns, images of the Oomingmak knitters, and/or draping images of the qiviut projects, in various combinations.

We also worked a lot with a musk-ox photo that your husband, Dominic Cotignola, had shot while you and he were in Alaska for your traveling research. Dom produced so many fantastic photographs, but you and Mayapriya and I all loved this particular one. I think we liked the abstract composition and "otherness" of it. The image is very artistic, and when Mayapriya combined it with some of the other images we thought it made a terrific cover.

We worked hard on adjusting everything so it worked together, and it looked like this would be the final cover.

However, we also know enough to seek outside opinions. I sent sample covers to Nomad's account manager at our distributor, who in turn sent it to several sales reps. We also took printouts to a knit-in at a local bookstore and solicited opinions from both knitters and the other knitting authors who were there. You also gathered reactions through your blog.

Some of the viewers liked the cover as well as we did.

However, we also heard these comments: "What's the cow doing on the cover?" "The chain stores will file this book under 'animal husbandry.'" "It makes me uncomfortable. I'd buy the book, but I'd put a plain brown wrapper over it," from someone whose opinion I care about a lot. I didn't want her to have to do that. And, finally, from a savvy sales rep whose bluntness I appreciate, "Lose the ox."

This was not what we wanted to hear. We were very near an outside deadline for the distributor's fall catalog. (This was January 2006—covers happen early, before you're ready.)

Here's the ox. It was not this in-your-face, of course, being combined with lace images and ice patterns. Dom took a fantastic photo, here acknowledged:

Over about thirty-six hours, Mayapriya and I worked intensely, sending new ideas back and forth as PDFs. When I say she's brilliant, I mean that at the very last minute, after we'd been fussing and fiddling with ideas that branched off previous concepts, she scrapped everything we’d done so far and sent me a completely reconceptualized cover, in which she came up with a vision that all of us loved.

This had been the sort of stress situation where people start breaking down and throwing things. None of us did. And look what came of it!

I think Mayapriya, you, and I still miss the musk ox—an image I had hoped to find space for in the finished book, but didn't.

But we also think that this is the cover the book was meant to have.

Donna: Arctic Lace was printed in Canada. When I do book signings and teach classes, people always ask me why so many books are printed in China. Can you explain why this is so, and why you were able to print Arctic Lace in Canada?

Deb: There are at least two different questions tucked into this interesting inquiry about printing.

The first is why so many books are printed in China. The primary reason is that, because of labor costs, it has become far more economical to print full-color books in Asia (not just China). Because of changes in the distribution system, publishers today have less of a share of the retail price to use in producing the book (editorial, design, printing, and author payments) than they have had even in the recent past. They're looking to save every penny they can, and they can save a lot of pennies by printing color in Asia, even with the cost of freight and the four-month shipping delays and the import requirements factored in.

Yes, there’s generally a whole lot more color in books these days. That’s because of electronic layout programs and Asian printing.

At Nomad Press, we prefer to keep our printing in North America and to invest in intensive editorial and design work, instead of color printing. We have so far selected for publication books that do not need interior color—and where color will not be missed.

We could, and probably will, add a drop-in color section to some future books. We can do that economically while still keeping our printing in North America. (Some North American printers, including some of the ones that we use, do still provide color work—at the very-high-quality, and therefore very expensive, end of the spectrum.)

We chose to print in Canada for a number of reasons. Nomad Press participates in the Green Press Initiative, which aims to conserve natural resources and preserve endangered forests. There are printers in both Canada and the United States who are part of this effort, and we print our books with those firms.

Arctic Lace was printed by one of the two firms that has worked with Raincoast Books to produce Canadian copies of Harry Potter books on 100-percent postconsumer recycled stock. They're fantastic to work with and we knew that our book would be high in quality and delivered on time—which was critical for this title because of your, and my, scheduled trip to Alaska for Yarn Expo III which was happening on the pub date! "Late" was not an option.

Donna: What was the most challenging part about getting the project from rough manuscript to final book? (Tell the truth; don't worry about embarrassing me or anything.)

Deb: Donna, you and I both know there were a lot of challenging parts of getting this book from rough manuscript to finished book! We both could have, and normal people maybe would have, thrown in the towel any number of times. But we were both passionate about it, and we kept going, and now that the book is out there I’m really glad we did!

So, what was the most challenging part, though?

Well, I think we might both pinpoint as a challenging part the first full copy of your manuscript that you turned in to me. At this point, you had spent a huge amount of time on the project. You had gathered and read and visited and photographed and organized a massive amount of material and wrestled it into book form. You handed it off to me.

And I read it, and said to you, "Great, but you need to rewrite it, because this also needs to be a story about what the heck made you go all the way to Alaska. . . . And by the way, we need to cut about half of the chapter on what musk oxen eat. . . ."

That's a hard thing for an editor to say, and much harder for a writer to hear, with good reason. Donna, it takes incredible strength for a writer to say, "Okay," and turn around and do a full rewrite that takes the book up several levels in one complicated, wrenching move.

I want to acknowledge the toughness of that experience and thank you in public for being so dedicated to making the book come out right.

For me, there were a lot of big challenges—the book was a mammoth, complex job for both of us to tackle—but what comes to mind first is a challenge that was actually comparatively small when juxtaposed to other hurdles we both crossed, separately and together. This smaller problem did occur at a critical time.

Near the end of production, not long before we went to press, I opened the layout file for chapter 8 (the projects) and the typeface for the charts had been electronically scrambled. What I saw bore no relationship to charts, the original font, or anything even remotely similar.

There was no quick fix, either. I rebuilt every chart in that chapter from scratch at the last minute. I did rebuild them in a way that would be easier to straighten out if the problem happened again. Until we actually got the book to press, though, I kept my fingers crossed that the same thing would not happen on the charts in the other chapters. They could have done that even as I was preparing the final PDFs for the printer.

I am still grateful both that it didn't and that the glitch occurred before the proofreader's final review of the pages. Whew!

Yet the very most challenging part of this book was having to delay the publication date repeatedly in order to make the book the best job that you and I could possibly accomplish. As you know too well, both author and publisher invest literally years of full-time work in a book before it appears. All of that is unpaid work, which we do because we have a good idea and faith in our ability to pull it off. Meanwhile, we need to continue making our livings in other ways. It's a long haul. And every six-month delay means six more months of intense, overtime work, part of it for the project and part of it to pay enough bills to keep working.

I am so glad when all the pieces of a book have been assembled and checked and sent off to the printer. That moment warrants a big fireworks display. Or a huge, deep, relaxed breath.

Then, of course, some of the work has just started. Then it’s time to send this project that we’ve both spent years on out into the world, tell other people about it, and see if they like it as much as we have thought they would. Fortunately, this time it seems that they do! I’ve just ordered the third print run this morning. Whew again!

*

Note: Arctic Lace is for sale through yarn shops and bookstores, both brick-and-mortar and online. Ask for it at your favorite shop.

Wee caps and coming Arctic Lace blog tour

I have a nice stash of tiny caps piling up to send to Caps to the Capitol. It’s still growing.

As of yesterday, though, I was back work at half-throttle—should have been a quarter, but several of the tasks I'd delayed or gotten extensions on couldn't be put off any more.

No matter how much I delegate to the dogs and the cat, they tend to ignore the necessities of computer- and paperwork (except the cat, who is proficient at knocking paperwork off the desk and at impeding my ability to use the computer mouse because my hand is (1) in her territory and (2) not doing anything so important that I can't use it to pat her). I paid some bills I hadn't gotten to over the weekend, answered e-mails, set up a phone meeting for today, and designed an ad. We don't do many ads, and they always take way longer to design than they should.

I'd show you the caps I’ve knitted, except that I'm still on the part of the camera manual just after “charge the battery.” Even if I’d gotten to “how to click the shutter,” I wouldn't show you my desk just now.

Tomorrow, the blog tour for Donna Druchunas' new book, Arctic Lace: Knitting Projects and Stories Inspired by Alaska's Native Knitters, will visit this blog. Because I am the book's editor and publisher, we will be turning the tables for this installment of the three-week tour. Instead of having me interview Donna, she will be interviewing me.

Fortunately, my friend Kris, who is a knitter, spinner, llama lover and rescuer, ADD coach, and all-around good person currently living with unreliable phone service despite what I think are at least three phone numbers (ah, technology), brought me a stash of elderberry and echinacea cough lozenges, one of which is currently helping me think without cold-induced paroxysms.

I should have plenty here to keep me focused on answering Donna's questions.

Loooooong post tomorrow! Lots of inside scoop on making a book! (Four years condensed to one blog post.)

Knitting (and reading) while coughing

Lynn at Colorjoy! recently wrote about having to (as in MUST DO) take a day off (two posts for 10/20/2006). This is really hard for a self-employed person with a lot of passionate interests, and no sick leave or other paid time off. Yet it's essential. We are not, despite our intentions and hopes and sometimes appearances to the contrary, Energizer Bunnies.

I have gotten pretty good at recognizing when I'm running on the edge and powering back to avoid being caught by a bug, but I didn't slow down enough last week. I've been in bed (except for times like now) since Tuesday, and I should have been there Monday.

One of the good parts about lying in bed with no energy is reading. Usually one of the good parts is knitting. I've been too fogged and coughing too much for real knitting, even though it's here to do, although I found a solution for that, too. But back to the books for a moment.

I've read Charles J. Shields' Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. It's a masterful job of writing biography from research without access to the subject although she might read the results some day (Lee protects her privacy and didn't even want to review for factual accuracy). Shields walks the fine line of not conjecturing beyond what he learned and of getting depth to his writing and shaping the work with grace. (That wasn't very gracefully phrased; however, I'm not in writing brain; reading only.)

I've read parts of The Forensic Analysis of Knots and Ligatures, by Robert Chisnall. Not my normal choice of reading matter. I'm fascinated by knots and have been researching particular types for my own purposes. A friend is writing a suspense novel and is fascinated by forensics. When I came across this book, I thought she might be interested. She was, and ordered it. It was due to arrive when she was out of town and my daughter and I were watching her house. She told me to open the package and take a look when the book appeared.

It's very odd. I've learned a few interesting things applicable to my own general research, but I also need to take the content in small doses. Fortunately, it's heavily illustrated with knots, not crime scenes. I did learn that most people know how to tie very few knots, so that some of the knots that I take for granted are considered "sophisticated." Also that "Evidence from nonperishable artifacts indicates that human beings have used knots and cordage for at least 300,000 years." And that analysis of knots has only been used in forensics for the last couple of decades. I assume that's "systematically" used. And the system presented here is impressive, if sometimes gruesome for those with an ability to visualize. I don't know how far I'll read.

My daughter helped me counterbalance that book by bringing Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine from the library, and it felt good to read an excellent novel all in one pass (well, forty-five minutes of reading, fifteen minutes of napping; repeat). It was what our library calls a "here and now" title, which means it's a recent release but you don't need to be on a waiting list to check it out—if it's on the "here and now" table when you walk in, you grab it and it's yours, but you can only keep for three days (if you keep it longer, it turns into a rental book).

Then I pulled off the shelf a volume I obtained last spring and haven't had time to open: Oliver Statler's Japanese Pilgrimage, which is about a pilgrimage route around the island of Shikoku. The journey consists of visiting eighty-eight designated temples (plus, optionally, a number of unofficial temples) on a 1400-kilometer path around the island. (About 870 miles.)

Then I started (and will finish) Ian Reader's Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku, which has been on the shelf since about June, and it's also superb, although I got derailed because. . . .

My daughter went to the library again yesterday and brought me a bunch of books (she's trying to keep me in bed until I'm really healthy again). Three of them are "here and now" titles, which means if I want to read them, I need to complete one a day between now and Monday. I may or may not succumb.

I started on Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Pollan looks at the U.S. food supply from four different sources: mass production (the current "norm"), large-scale organic production, small-scale individual farm, and hunter-gatherer. It's more than fascinating, although I had to read something else to clear my brain before I tried to sleep last night.

Another book in the pile my daughter harvested is Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life. I had told my daughter I have limited ability to concentrate right now and wanted short books (Pollan's is not short). This slim volume was perfect for between 2 and 3 this morning, while I was sipping hot water with lemon juice and honey, to quiet the coughing enough that I could go back to sleep. I own this book and have probably read it, but it felt new (or new again).

All of this reading feels luxurious, even though I'm getting antsy at not being able to work much. I'm spending an hour or two in the office every day, just keeping up with the top 1 percent of what's required to manage a small publishing business, freelance work, and whatever else it is that I do most days.

I've been wanting to knit. I've especially been wanting to design the upper body of the sweater I'm knitting that's inspired by a garment in Norsk Strikkedesign. The original's a pullover and mine's a cardigan. I'm changing the neckline, although I haven't decided to what (sleeves and lower body are completely knitted/steeked). Also, the charts are printed in such dark colors that they're basically illegible, so I'm drafting my own designs that have a similar feeling. And, of course, I've changed the colors. But so far I don't have the energy to THINK enough to get this knitting moving again, and thinking is normally a pleasure, especially when it's visual and involves pattern. I need to wait until it is a pleasure.

So instead I am knitting baby caps for Caps to the Capitol, which is co-sponsored by Save the Children and Warm Up America. I have a lot of scraps of yarn. Each cap takes an astonishingly small amount of yarn, time, and brain. I'd like to be knitting vests for older Afghani kids, but both the amounts of yarn and the energy are harder to come by right now. They would require Thinking and More Consistent Effort than the caps. Besides, I have a lot of scrap worsted yarn in a bag within reach of the bed. I had wondered what it was doing there.

Here's the basic cap pattern in worsted weight—a real no-brainer:

Needles 6 and 8. Knit in the round or back and forth, your choice (I'm in the round: easier).

Smaller needles: Cast on 44. Rib 1.5 inches (3.75 cm).

Change to larger needles and stockinette. Knit until 5 inches (12.5 cm) from cast on. Start to decrease (yeah, I go to four needles here).

Decrease rounds (so easy I can do them while coughing):

*K2, k2tog*
K
*K1, k2tog*
K
*K2tog, 1*, end k2tog
K
*K2tog* {last two rounds optional if you happen to forget them}

Pull end through remaining stitches.

This would bore me silly if I weren't sick, but piling up these little caps has a different sort of satisfaction. When I'm well, I'll run them all through the washing machine and feel proud of whatever I've done. Meanwhile, I'm just finishing caps and putting them in a small box. On the deadline for this project, January 2, 2007, I'll mail whatever has accumulated. Maybe just what I knitted while healing. Maybe more. Doesn't matter. I'm doing something useful.

I do feel blessed that I can read some books start-to-finish. That's rare in my life under current "normal" circumstances. Statler's been on the shelf since May, waiting. Lovely to read all the way through.

Yes, I can knit while reading. Sometimes right now that works, and sometimes it's too much. That's okay.

Maybe I'll get enough energy to read the digital camera's instruction book (past "how to charge the battery," which I've done) and figure out how to take a photo. Not this morning, though. Back to bed. One of the dogs will be ecstatic; she likes to snuggle. The other will join me occasionally and will make sure she's guarding the front of the house the rest of the time. The cat will be disappointed; she'd rather be on my desk and keyboard, inserting typos and shoving papers onto the floor. Her work's no fun for her if I'm not trying to do mine. She doesn't visit me much upstairs.

If you want to read something more coherent that I’ve written (and see some photos I took with a borrowed camera), check out this week's Knitter's Review. Yes, it was that beautiful, rain or shine, and the people were even nicer.

I hear The Omnivore's Dilemma and two knit caps calling. I have one cap at the ribbing stage, one at stockinette. Sometimes right now even 1/1 ribbing is too taxing. But there's always stockinette.

Latvian textile marvels, 2

Those Latvians are doing it again. . . . Incredible textile accomplishments. . . .

I don't have time to participate in many groups or lists, but I do keep up with the Ethnic Knits group on Yahoo. So that's where I learned about the massive Latvian mitten project last week. Yesterday a couple of other people mentioned this on their blogs (probably more than a couple; I track only a few of the possibilities). If I had already figured out how to do trackbacks, I’d direct you to Colorjoy!’s and Yarn Spinner’s specific posts (both 10/16/2006). Since I’m supposed to be in bed with a cold, links to their main blog pages will need to suffice.

As soon as something’s been said on a topic, I generally head for another topic. . . . But this represents another door of the textile castle that opened in front of me (see yesterday) and part of my take on this mitten-knitting is a bit different than I’ve seen elsewhere, because I’m a spinner who has an unusual interest in the breeds of sheep that produce superb wool for handwork.

However, my amazement closely resembles that of Lynn Hershberger (ColorJoy!) and Joanne Seiff (Yarn Spinner) and the member of the Ethnic Knits group on Yahoo from whom I heard of this first.

Latvian knitters have been preparing 4500 pairs of mittens—no two pairs the same—to present to participants in the NATO Summit that will take place in Riga at the end of November.

Here are just half of those mittens. Here's an article with more information.

There are 265 women and 3 men doing the knitting; the youngest knitter is 30 and the oldest is 86. Each pair of mittens requires up to 90 g (just over 3 ounces) of wool. The information on the site says they are using 383 kg (844 pounds) of wool that has been shorn from 38 sheep. (Some of those mittens have to be lighter than 90 g, that's for sure . . . they've got an average of 85 g, or 2.9 ounces, per pair. Never mind; the idea's intact, although my mind is boggling at how fine the gauge must be to get a whole mitten—with color-patterning, so pretty much double-thickness throughout—from about 1.5 ounces of fiber.)

Somebody catch me if I’m wrong on any of this, but I think they significantly miscalculated how many sheep they were shearing. I think they needed a larger flock.

The clean weight of fleece is less than the shorn weight. First you shear. Then you skirt the fleece well, so you’re only working with the best wool. After that, you wash the wool, removing between a quarter and half of the gross weight in the form of grease and lanolin—protectants that the sheep needs but the spinner and knitter generally don’t. Small additional amounts of fiber also go by the wayside in the spinning process.

To get 844 pounds of clean wool from 38 sheep, each of those critters would have to supply more than 22 pounds of clean fleece, or between 28 and 44 pounds of grease fleece.

Uh, no.

A good estimate of annual growth for a fleece from a breed that produces fine-mitten–quality wool is between 10 and 14 pounds in the grease. Let’s assume this is wool with only a moderate amount of grease, say one-quarter to one-third of the weight, because the calculations produce interesting results without going to the max.

(Technical wool digression, skip to next paragraph unless you like this kind of information, as I do: For a baseline comparison, Corriedale, which would provide terrific fine-mitten wool, grows between 10 and 17 pounds of fiber a year but loses 40 to 50 percent in washing. It looks like most of the sheep in Latvia are Latvian dark-headed or Latvian blackface. One source indicates these are a cross between Shropshire (72%) and Oxfordshire (28%), two Down breeds from the U.K., and estimates average grease fleece yield at 5 kg, or 11 pounds. Another says they began with local sheep, bred with Oxford, Shropshire, and Hampshire rams, all U.K. Down breeds, and gives average fleece weights of 4.7 kg, 10 pounds, for ewes and 6.8 kg, 15 pounds, for rams. To get a grease-to-clean weight ratio, I'm looking for comparison at Shropshires, nifty and useful sheep that are an endangered but recovering breed, and their fleeces lose between a quarter and half of their weight between shearing time and spinning time. I conclude that the ballpark numbers I'm working with are good enough for this nonscientific purpose.)

So let’s say each sheep contributes between 6.5 and 9.25 pounds of clean wool. (I'm setting these endpoints by imagining greatest loss for a small fleece, one-third of a 10-pound grease weight, and least loss for a large fleece, one-quarter of a 14-pounder.)

You’d need between 90 and 130 sheep to come up with 844 pounds of clean wool (not counting spinning loss).

Following this simple progression further, I'm interested in how many pairs of mittens a single year’s growth of wool can provide: with my adjusted yield calculations (which are closer to reality than the FAQ's statement, but still based on estimations), each sheep seems to have provided enough fiber for between 35 and 50 pairs of mittens.

That wool is a renewable resource. Each sheep will grow a similar amount every year for as long as it lives, say between seven and ten years. In a lifetime, a sheep could grow enough wool for between 245 and 500 pairs of mittens, depending on fleece size, scouring and spinning loss, and longevity.

These aren’t discount-store mittens, almost-adequate today and needing to be replaced next week.

These are durable, hand-down-to-grandchildren mittens that keep hands warm and are gorgeous, too. (Admittedly, they may not make it to the grandchildren if they're used to build a massive number of snow-forts, but they'll still last much longer and provide a whole lot more protection than most of the alternatives.)

I was impressed by the photo of the mittens as soon as I saw it. Now I’m impressed by some of the associated numbers.

If this inspires you to look further into Latvian knitting and designs, two relevant books have been published by Meg Swansen at Schoolhouse Press, in Pittsville, Wisconsin: Lizbeth Upitis’ Latvian Mittens: Traditional Designs and Techniques (1997) and Joyce Williams’ Latvian Dreams: Knitting from Weaving Charts (2000).

This kind of information helps me appreciate plain-color stockinette hand-knitted mittens and socks, too. Especially if the yarn's been handspun from fiber shorn from just the right sheep.

And I'm really impressed with the Latvian vision and skill that the mitten-knitting project embodies. WOW.

Latvian textile marvels, 1

Inhabiting the world of textiles is like living in a castle where I'm constantly finding hidden doors that lead to whole wings full of treasures that I hadn't imagined existed. I've come across two instances of that this week. Both have Latvian roots. I'll comment about one today and the other tomorrow.

Donna Druchunas, author of Arctic Lace, brought a small, amazing book along on the trip we both took recently to Alaska. She loaned it to me to read on the flight home, although I ended up trying (unsuccessfully) to sleep instead.

Last night, I opened the book and read the whole thing. It's A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space: An Exploration of the Intersection of Higher Geometry and Feminine Handcraft, by Margaret Wertheim. Although the topic is non-Euclidean geometry and my last math class was algebra 2 in high school, I loved this well-written, beautifully designed little book. It talks about theoretical math in terms I can understand: crochet.

Here's a note from the web site of the publisher, The Institute For Figuring, that explains the basic concept better than I can: "For two thousand years mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry—the plane and the sphere. But in the early nineteenth century they became aware of another space in which lines cavorted in aberrant formations. Offending reason and common sense, this new space came to be known as the hyperbolic plane, in homage to its abundant excess of parallel lines. Though the formalities of this space were known for 200 years, it was only in 1997 that mathematician Daina Taimina finally worked out how to make a physical model of the hyperbolic plane. The method she used was crochet. Here, IFF director Margaret Wertheim presents a brief history of hyperbolic space and a field guide to its crocheted manifestations."

Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina (she's now at Cornell University) first tried making a model with knitting, but the number of stitches that accumulated on the needles made the results cumbersome and impractical. So she shifted to crochet.

I read an article about Taimina's work by Michele Lock in the 2005 issue of Interweave Crochet, but I didn't connect with it at the time: hmmm, interesting; not WOW! I've needed to go back and rediscover the article. Sometimes the time is right for the lightbulb to go off.

That article includes instructions for crocheting one type of hyperbolic plane. A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space suggests several other ways of playfully approaching this exercise. While we're talking serious mathematical theory here, we're also talking fun that is showing up in the ways that contemporary crochet designers are manipulating hook-and-yarn.

The Institute for Figuring has asked people to send in images of their hyperbolic planes (at their web site, see "Gallery" and then "The People's Hyperbolic Gallery"). There's a related interview on the site as well . . . one that my daughter, who minored in math, may need to read, too. . . . If you look at it and start glazing over because you're not a mathematician, I'd recommend that you check out the book anyway!

If Taimina had not been born into a culture that valued handcrafts and had not also trained as a mathematician, the ideas of hyperbolic space might have been developed but there would probably be no effective model. There certainly wasn't one before she had her AHA! moments. And the models that she has devised explain the concepts (and thus prepare the way for further extensions of the ideas) in ways that no other medium could manage.

You can get as deeply and as seriously into this as you like, or you can just dip in a toe and play. Math that seems like magic, and that connects with my fingers, yarn, and a crochet hook, cavorting in aberrant formations, offending reason and common sense. . . . Does life get any better?

Compromises: line-by-line patterns

I’m sure that the tech support person for the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) company has to follow a script when he attempts to determine what is wrong with the unit a customer is calling about. We have been working back and forth by e-mail.

Yesterday, his message to me was, in sum, “I understand your concern. There is no issue with the unit. . . . I suggest you to check with some other wall outlet and contact a certified electrician if the issue persists. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me. Have a good day!”

I called an electrician who tested the UPS (dead) and the house power (great). I wrote back with the specific results.

Today’s reply from the UPS tech support guy is: “I understand your concern. It has been determined from the information you have provided that your [name] product is under warranty and has been declared defective. [Name] will gladly provide you with a replacement unit under our comprehensive warranty program.”

I did ask if they would also gladly pay the electrician’s bill. I don’t think that’s in the script.

The other thing I am doing right now is knitting a sample sweater for a book that will be published next year. I’ve been involved in tech editing this pattern for its four sizes, which makes me acutely aware of the design compromises that must be made in order to produce line-by-line instructions that will work reasonably well for each of the sizes and not consume too many printed pages.

In this case, there's a texture pattern on one of the front pieces of a cardigan. The repeats of the texture pattern need to coincide nicely, or at least reasonably well, with the shaping of the front edge. The positioning of the pattern could be worked out more gracefully for each size. However, there would then need to be four different sets of line-by-line instructions for that front piece. That's not an option, both because of the time required to fine-tune the pattern for four sizes and because of the space that would be required to write out the instructions. The resulting large amount of text would also probably confuse, or be intimidating to, knitters who want to make the sweater. The compromise that we've come up with will produce a nice sweater in each size. It just won't be as refined as it could be.

As those who know me might imagine, I’m a great fan of the approach to knitting that’s presented in Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’ Knitting in the Old Way and in much of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s work. I inadvertently began knitting this way—what's now called "in the old way" or by the percentage system, although I worked then and now more with eyeballed proportions than percentages—before PGR's and EZ's wonderful resources were published. Since their books and other "break from the script" titles started to appear, I have felt fortunate to find a continuing supply of real support for the way I knit, as well as technical refinements and new horizons to explore.

This makes me quite impatient with errors that I find in line-by-line instructions—and grateful for the knitting knowledge that lets me detour around (or plow right past) those errors. It also makes me realize that the way to get the best results in a given size of sweater is to design for that size, and not to grade up or down from another size.

I also know that when I knit in this way, the sweaters I make will fit the not-standard-proportions bodies that the people I know live in.

I also remember what I felt like before I had developed full confidence in this approach—not in my ability to knit something right the first time but in my ability to problem-solve my way to the end results that I envisioned. It was scary. I was afraid I’d make mistakes, get lost or befuddled, make a mess.

Yes, I’ve ripped a lot of knitting over the years. I've done it by choice, because my vision for what I was making changed while I was making the item or because I thought of a better way to achieve my goal.

I've ripped a lot more while trying to follow a faulty line-by-line pattern.

The only true "failures" of no-pattern knitting that I can think of were two projects that I completed without making big-enough gauge swatches. One produced a Norwegian-style color-patterned sweater that ended up being worn by my six-foot-five cousin instead of by me. The colors were better on him anyway. The other was the first time I knitted with my early handspun, which was more irregular than I realized. I made a four-inch gauge swatch and should have made an eight-inch one. I wore the resulting sweater for many years anyway. It was knitted in a ribbed pattern that stretched. I just prefer more ease. Each of my "failures" produced a wearable sweater. I can live with that. I also make bigger gauge swatches now.

I use patterns as inspirations all the time. They give me lots of great ideas. I read through patterns to pick up tricks and see how other knitters have achieved their effects.

But it’s so much easier not to use the line-by-line instructions.

A script often doesn’t get me where I want to go, or requires unnecessary expense and delay.

While I wait to hear what the tech support guy has to say next (other than "I understand your concern"), I’m putting together a short list of resources for what I call “bushwhacking” knitting: learning to work without a script, er, pattern. Coming soon.

Review of Yarn Expo written!

It's done! Text: 3000 words. Photos: between 27 and 29, depending (total size for all, web-optimized: 900K). Captions: 900 words.

This may need to be cut to fit the intended space—I don't have an assigned word count—but it's whole, complete, and says what I want it to about the experience. If it's published at the intended location, I'll link from here. If not, the whole thing will appear here, probably in sections.

Good night.

Addendum: Published! Here's the Knitter's Review link.

Small publishing: interruptible power supply

The thing about being a very small business is that there's frequently no one else available to wear any of the hats. Since I flew back from Anchorage a week ago, I have been—among other things—serving as my own tech support. The primary computer began to shut down randomly and unexpectedly. It would turn itself off and the monitor would, of course, suddenly go black. This is the computer on which I do layout and keep the books and from which I write the checks . . . just about everything except e-mail and web-surfing.

This sort of malfunction severely reduces productivity in the one-person office.

Sometimes it would shut down just as I'd sent a document to the printer. That's suspicious. But sometimes it would shut down when the computer was on but no work was being done . . . and no programs other than the standard start-up array were running. That's very curious, and complicates the job of tracing the problem to its source.

While I was plugging a different printer into the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) as part of my personal troubleshooting process (after I'd stress-tested the CPU with a dual dose of Stress Prime 2004 and it had performed sturdily for an hour), the electricity SNAP/POP arced in a big way, produced a great blue spark with yellow edges, dimmed the lights throughout the basement as well as the two other computers' monitors, and pushed two other UPS units into beep-beep battery-backup action (supporting my e-mail/web computer and my daughter's system). I thought the jolt was going to blow the house power, but it didn't. Whew. (Of course, I got the plug back out of the outlet ASAP, unplugged everything from the wall, and QUIT that round of troubleshooting. I wonder if the experience had anything to do with the fact that I went to bed at 11 last night and didn't fall asleep until 4:30 this morning?)

Let's skip a bunch of the back-and-forth between me and tech support for the UPS manufacturer, which has happened by e-mail. I could have phoned, but I figured it would take less of my time, in total, to work by e-mail, even though the volley back and forth happens more slowly. I did go buy another UPS, somewhat reluctantly, in order to get the primary system back into operation. The new unit seems to be doing just fine. I have experienced no system shut-downs since it was installed.

Going back to the problem UPS, I performed the test procedures outlined by the support technician, all of which went fine. None of them required me to plug the unit back into the wall or subject any of my equipment to being attached, which I was not about to do, no way. . . . I've worked enough with electricity to know when to pay attention to an arc and keep my distance. Everything I was asked to do was a self-test, battery power only, not on house current, no load in place. Yes, fine, fine.

So the technician wrote back this morning, "I understand your concern. There is no issue with the unit. There is a short circuit in the load connected or it may short circuit in the wall outlet. I suggest you to check with some other wall outlet and contact a certified electrician if the issue persists." The phrase "I understand your concern" has been part of each communication. I'm not sure that's true.

Dead end.

So I called my favorite electrical contractor.

"Let's check the UPS first," was the initial suggestion. Several attempts to run the electrician's drill through or off the UPS failed. Nothing worked, whether the supposedly no-issue UPS was plugged into the grid or should have been running on its battery. The power transfer rates measured 14 volts (not much) on the battery-backed-up outlets and 0, that's zero, on the surge-only outlets. Professional diagnosis: "This thing is toast."

We also tested the household current just to be sure. "You had some work done on these circuits before you put in this equipment, didn't you?" Yes. According to all measurements, it's still more than fine. The house needs a paint job, but it's got the necessary power to get the work done.

I've written battery back-up tech support again, and I hope the situation is resolved quickly now that we have specific data.

When my daughter came home from work she brought the mail, which included a book another independent publisher had sent me. I'm sure the package left its source in good shape. Here's what it looked like when it arrived:

The delivery confirmation sticker's still in place, and delivery probably got confirmed. Yep, that's right, it's here. Here's another shot, from a bit closer:

That's kind of what I feel like. I do note that I think I'll be able to read the book inside just fine. I don't think it's been ripped apart.

What I accomplished today: when I got the phone call from the electrician saying help would appear within half an hour, I did rearrange 1350 pounds of books in the garage because I wanted to make sure we could reach the circuit breakers easily. You always need easy access to the circuit breakers when you call an electrician. . . . (Another thing I did was flip the correct, badly labeled switch to power-down the office on my first try. You always need to mess with the circuit breakers when you call an electrician.)

The good news about book-moving is that we're halfway ready to receive the cartons containing the second run of Arctic Lace, which will ship from the printer on the 20th, just nine days from now. Pub date was eleven days ago and all the wholesale suppliers are out of stock. I have one copy of the book here, and it's not only spoken for but personalized for the recipient. I'll be extremely glad to have more books, and it's great to be close to having a place to put them.

And when all of today's extra tasks appeared unannounced on my schedule I was almost, almost finished with my travel report on the Alaska State Yarn Council's Yarn Expo. Later tonight, while my daughter watches "Lost," I plan to give myself the gift of completing that story: doing final editing of the text, final processing and labeling of the images, final sequencing of the captions.

Ah. Sweet progress.