The Independent Stitch

Going "home" to Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival

Warning: Long post, with a walk through past calendars, and a bit of spinning/knitting content toward the end.

Going back to Maryland

It's hard to believe that a week from today I'm scheduled to be at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival for the first time since 2000. On Thursday morning, I'll pick up Sharon, another former Interweave Press employee with whom I've almost always attended the festival, and we'll head for the airport.

In past years, Sharon and I have gone to Maryland because Interweave sent us. We had a great time, in addition to working really hard. This year, neither of us is an Official Presence any longer (me since 2000, Sharon since 2007). We're just going to Maryland because . . . we had a great time, and we miss the folks we regularly saw there. Not everyone we'd like to see is attending, but enough people we know will be there to make it worth the travel and the time. Because most of the people we know work the festival, as we did, we'll probably mostly just get to say hello, but still. And we never know who we'll meet that we don't know yet and will be keeping up with for years to come. Plus we both could use a short break from our respective "normal" lives.

It says a lot that . . . given all the possibilities of where we could go and what we could do, either separately or as a tag-team like we used to be . . . we've chosen to head for a fairgrounds in West Friendship, Maryland, on the first weekend in May.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've wondered how many times I've been to the Maryland festival before (nine) and what year I first went (1992). In going through my calendars, I discovered a few things. One of them is how tightly we had to work the publication schedule out a year in advance just so we could handle the logistics of being out of town right then. Another is . . . well, I'll wait for 1998 to talk about that realization, which ties to 2008 in ways I hadn't put together.

Going to the festival for the first time

Not in the calendars but in memory: Linda Berry Walker first suggested that Spin-Off magazine should be represented at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival and urged us to get there. (This was before the World Wide Web, which wasn't created until 1989, and Linda's farm was as fine as it is now, but smaller!)

This goes back a way. I think I first met Linda at a weekend conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The topic was "Wool as a Second Crop." I've never owned sheep, but I'm the sort of spinner who has always been interested in them (at least in wool-growing sheep . . . not all sheep do grow wool) so whenever possible I've attended workshops about the economics of wool, wool-grading, and the like. I already knew who Linda was, in part because she had written some articles for the early issues of Spin-Off, which I'd subscribed to since it started up in 1977 when I still lived in Washington state, but I don't think we'd met face-to-face.

That workshop took place some time between 1983 and 1986. I think my daughter had been born by then and that we had probably moved into town (early 1982), but we definitely had not yet moved from Massachusetts to Colorado. That move happened in 1986, when I started at Interweave as book editor. A year later I was asked to take on the editing of Spin-Off as well, which I did, starting with the Spring 1988 issue (my tenure ended with the Spring 2000 issue).

From Spring 1988 until mid-1991, Linda wrote terrific columns on specific sheep breeds for Spin-Off: Border Cheviot, Border Leicester, Coopworth, Corriedale, Jacob, Karakul, Lincoln, Merino, Rambouillet, Romney, Scottish Blackface. Plus an article called "To Save a Sheep, Spin Its Fleece."

In part because of the complications of publication schedules and budgets, Linda had to drop loud hints about Maryland for several years before we got the go-ahead to check out the festival.

• 1992 Went to Maryland to see what all the fuss was about. Came back registered for a booth for the next year.
  Friday, 5/1: 8:10a pick up Sharon. United 468 DEN-IAD, 10:41a-4:02p.
  Monday, 5/4: United 127 IAD-DEN, 9:15a-11:01a.
  Friday, 5/8: Spin-Off to press.

So in 1993, we were there officially for the first time. I spent my weekends demonstrating spinning in the booth. We didn't sell things. We just spun and chatted up spinning, and sent people off to the other booths to buy Interweave's books and magazines. I met a bunch of folks whom I only knew from online connections, through CompuServe's fiber forum.

Because demonstrations need to attract people's attention, for the first several years I did my weekend's work with a Navajo spindle. Most people hadn't seen one in action, and I enjoy spinning with this type of tool. It's both eye-catching and efficient. Here's a YouTube demo of the technique.

As the years went on, I made a tradition of buying something fun at the festival to spin up before I got home. Because of the circumstances, it was usually prepared fiber, dyed in a color that would catch people's attention as they walked by. By the end of the weekend, after between fourteen and sixteen hours of spinning, the bones of my right hand were usually pretty sore but I'd had a fine time and produced several random skeins of yarn.

• 1993 First year with a booth. Well, half-booth. Building V, booth 18B. It was a narrower-than-standard space in front of the utility closet, which fairgrounds staff needs to get into from time to time. That was fine for us, because we could just step aside from our chatting and demonstration and let them through. Building V is now called Main.
  Friday, 4/30: Summer Spin-Off to press
  Friday, 4/30 (same day): 8:15a pick up Sharon. United 348 DEN-IAD, 10:36a-4:04p.
  Monday, 5/3: United 126 IAD-DEN, 9:05a-10:50a.
  Tuesday, 5/11: Spin-Off blueline (final review of printer's proof before magazine goes on press).

Maryland becomes a regular event

For the first several years, we flew into Dulles. Later we sometimes went into Baltimore; everything depended on which was least expensive. We'd generally arrive on Friday, set up that evening (the other booths where people actually sell things spend all day Friday setting up), and then do the demo work all day Saturday and Sunday.

Sometimes it was hot, and a few times it rained prodigiously. Mostly the weather was great and the fresh lemonade tasted fantastic. We generally didn't have time to leave the booth to stand in line for food at regular lunch time, so we'd stock up with healthy snacks at a grocery store, stash them under the table in the booth, and nibble our way through the days.

• 1994
  Friday, 4/29: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/6: United FNL-DEN-IAD.
  Monday, 5/9: United return.
  Flew to Maryland out of the local small airport, which had a connector flight to Denver for a few years; there was no extra cost on our tickets, but usually much extra turbulence on the short flights along the foothills; sometimes the connector flights were canceled.
  Tuesday, 5/10: Spin-Off blueline.
  
  
• 1995 My daughter went along to Maryland one of these years; neither of us can remember exactly which year, but it was between 1994 and 1997.
  Friday, 4/28: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/5: Continental 1817 & 225 DEN to either IAD or BWI, via somewhere else, 10:10a-?p.
  Monday, 5/8: Continental 220 & 1804, 8:45a-3:09p.
  Tuesday, 5/9: Spin-Off blueline.

• 1996
  Friday, 4/26: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/3: American 424 DEN to IAD or BWI, 8:49a-6:30p.
  Monday, 5/6: American 1677 & 419, IAD or BWI to DEN via DFW, 7:53a-11:53a.
  Tuesday, 5/7: Spin-Off blueline.

• 1997
  Wednesday, 4/30: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/2: 7:15a pick up Sharon. United 296 DEN-IAD, 10:40a-3:47p.
  We almost never did anything but go to the festival, work, and come home (note pattern of to-press and blueline dates tucked around the festival; this wasn't easy, because every magazine's schedule affects every other magazine's schedule, and we were dodging around multiple publications to make this happen). Sometimes there was a contradance at Glen Echo Park on Sunday evening, after we got the booth packed up, and we'd stop and check it out. In 1997, however, Sharon and I stayed an extra day and took public transportation into D.C. and went to The Textile Museum to see two exhibits, one of very fine knitting and one about netted structures. They were fantastic.
  Tuesday, 5/6: United 1821 IAD-DEN, 8:55a-10:35a.
  Wednesday, 5/7: Spin-Off blueline.

A pivotal year: 1998

Trudy and Jan Van Stralen of Louet offered to stop on their way from Canada and bring my daughter to Maryland for the weekend from the school she attended for two years in New York. The scheduling didn't work out, but it would have been great fun all around!

The big deal that did happen, though: 1998 was the year that Don Bixby, the director of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, and I sat on the grass outside building V and had a conversation that led to the Save the Sheep Project.

Judy also came along to Maryland. (She was getting interested in spinning. The spacious room you see in the photos on that last link was made available to us for the final judging of the Save the Sheep entries because of Judy's efforts. But none of us could foresee that, of course.)

• 1998
  Wednesday, 4/29: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/1: 6a pick up Judy. United 276 DEN-IAD or BWI, 8:32a-1:33p. We didn't have to get to the airport two hours ahead in those days, or I would have had to pick up Judy before 5a.
  Monday, 5/4: United 1227 IAD or BWI-DEN, noon-1:38p.
  Tuesday, 5/5: Spin-Off blueline.

Here's what a few of my DayTimer notes look like from my meeting with Don:

I'd been interested in sheep, especially rare-breed sheep, for years. I'd first become aware of the rare-breeds issue when I edited Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot for the Handweavers Guild of America and published an article on the Navajo Sheep Project.

My fascination had continued to grow, and a few years before my conversation with Don at Maryland, I'd had a jolt when I looked over the list of endangered sheep breeds and realized how many of the names on the list corresponded to classic handspinning fibers that I'd hate to do without. Lincoln is a rare breed? Yikes! Leicester Longwool, that glorious, shiny, exquisite stuff? Jacob? Shetland, with its incomparable colors and textures??? Cotswolds? Oh, my.

And I hadn't even encountered yet some of the almost magical island breeds, remarkable for their tenacity as well as their wool quality.

Over the next two years, in addition to my regular work, the Save the Sheep project came into being. I'd initially thought that I'd simply gather existing research to provide the background for the project. As it turned out, nobody'd looked at sheep from this perspective before. Oops. I spent my evenings and weekends putting together the resources we needed to form the project's foundation.

One last official trip to Maryland, and one on my own

In 1999, the budget was a little tight and there was some talk about canceling the trip to Maryland. Those of us who had been attending said we would cut expenses as far as we could, but we thought it was important to be there. We stayed at a different motel (an inexpensive one that usually is booked up a year in advance . . . we lucked out); I slept on a rollaway. My daughter graduated from high school the next month.

• 1999
  Wednesday, 4/28: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Thursday, 4/29: United 1618 DEN-IAD or BWI, 12:45p-5:38p.
  Monday, 5/3: United 1641 IAD or BWI-DEN, 3:10p-4:52p.
  Tuesday, 5/4: Spin-Off blueline scheduled; actually arrived Wednesday, 5/5.

My last day as an Interweave employee was Wednesday, 5/31/2000, a few weeks after that year's Maryland festival. Amy Clarke (now Moore) had stepped up from assistant editor to editor and the Summer 2000 issue of Spin-Off was her first.

I spent my last weeks on staff finishing off the book that went along with the Save the Sheep project, which had come into being because of that conversation Don Bixby and I had sitting on the grass outside building V at the festival in 1998. So in 2000, I went to Maryland as "just me," not as a representative of Interweave. I shared a motel room with friends I'd met through the years at Maryland.

• 2000
  Friday, 5/5: United 250 DEN-IAD or BWI, 12:39p-7:53p.
  Monday, 5/8: United 1507 IAD or BWI-DEN, 5:15p-6:53p.
  Thursday, 5/11: daughter home from college (freshman year).
  Friday, 5/12: Handspun Treasures from Rare Wools to press.

• 2001 Maryland festival dates marked in calendar but X'd out; unable to attend.
• 2002 Maryland festival dates marked in calendar but lined through; unable to attend.
• 2003 Maryland festival dates not marked in calendar.

Maryland: reminders

On one of the Maryland weekends, I bought a cherry lap spindle from Noel Thurner at Norsk Fjord Fibers. And another year the weekend-spinning fiber I bought was a mix of blues, greens, and purples with some flash in it.

I spun all of the yarn for this vest (except the trim around the edges) while talking to people at the festival. I started the spinning after I got to the festival and I finished it before I got on the plane back to Denver. That's the spindle that I bought from Noel, which I used to make this yarn (and a lot of other yarn at other times):

. . . along with the book that wouldn't have happened without Maryland. The yarn is two-ply, sportweight (6 stitches to the inch in stockinette).

This vest reminds me: I've been talking about the cabled sweater I'm knitting, and have mentioned the way that I like the ribbings to flow into the patterns above them. Here, from the back of the vest, is an example of that idea in action:

The vest appeared in an early issue of Interweave Knits as part of a staff-knitted collection of vests, but when the pattern appeared it called for a regular 2/2 ribbing. For written-out patterns, that's the easiest solution because describing in line-by-line instructions what I actually did was a bit complicated. For charted patterns, you can easily put in (and knit) what's really there!

From 1998 to 2008

The rare breeds are still endangered, although some are in much better shape than they used to be (and some are just as vulnerable as they were).

And that's the connection to 2008. I'm still here, doing many of the same things to raise spinners' and knitters' awareness of where our materials come from (and that the best of them will disappear if we don't take at least some action), although under very different circumstances. I hadn't realized how much the Save the Sheep Project marked the close of my time with Interweave, nor the symmetry between that time and some of the major endeavors I've got underway for the next couple of years. I still want very much to do everything I can to keep the materials and the skills to use them alive and available, as part of our everyday lives as well as our human heritage. They can enhance our contemporary lives wonderfully, both in the doing and when we use the items that we make.

If we humans lose the skills of making things from scratch (like growing food, building canoes, spinning yarn for fabrics)—and we will lose the skills if the materials are not available to us—we will have lost something that is thousands of years old and of inestimable value, not just historically but spiritually. And that doesn't even get into the individual characters of the creatures and what they can teach us. . . .

A few days ago I got a lovely packet of Soay ram's wool that I'm looking forward to spinning, and—thanks to Donna Druchunas—twice last week I met with June Hall, who's been working on sheep conservation in the British Isles and Lithuania. June has written and published a delightful little book about Herdwick sheep called Henrietta Herdwick that is illustrated with charming felted images, and she keeps Soays herself (although my Soay packet came from a U.S. flock).

I'm unaccustomed to meeting other people who are interested in rare-breed sheep. It was quite astonishing to meet June, and I hope I can get to Woolfest some time!

Spring in Maryland and spring in Colorado

Usually when we have gone to the Maryland festival, we've been able to catch what is for us an early spring, with the dogwoods blooming. Here in Colorado, the crabapple blossoms began to open yesterday, and this morning we had both bright blooms and a light snowstorm:

• 2008
  Thursday, 5/1: 8:15a pick up Sharon. . . .

How I get myself into knitting trouble (again)

I'm mostly knitting swatches for publication illustrations except that I've just finished two larger (and more complex) projects that will be given to other people (more on those soon, I hope). While attempting to knit one colorwork swatch as I was watching a video, I had to rip three times. Obviously, that swatch required more attention and I needed a knitting project that I could work on during movies.

I have several projects going, but none of them feels appealing.

In February, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, of Yarn Harlot fame, finished a Must Have Cardigan from a Paton's book. She liked it. So I ordered the pattern book to take a closer look. I liked what I saw. And I've been pondering making one.

But as I pondered, I realized I'd have to lengthen the body by about 2 inches (5 cm). I always have to lengthen the body. And as I thought about that, I realized that the way the primary cable interacts with the neckline might end up disturbing me. It would change, of course, from the way it works in the design.

Instead of neatly paralleling the front opening, the cable would probably turn a corner and dead-end into it. I could, of course, adjust where I started the cable above the ribbing to compensate, but frankly I don't like to pay that much attention to row gauge and I don't like to engineer things that closely (although when I follow my thought process, I realize that statement seems totally bizarre).

So I plotted out the basic structure of the sweater . . . noting how the patterns work together and how they fit into the shapes of the pieces . . . thought about just finding another 23-stitch cable panel to substitute for pattern B, one that would not have such neat diagonals and so wouldn't care how it intersected with the V neckline.

And I also thought about how I like my cable patterns to flow out of the ribbing, even if that means my ribbing is irregular (i.e., mixes k2s and p2s and k3s, plotted to be in locations where they'll flow into the pattern above).

All this was looking like more time and planning than I had in mind, but this is how I get myself into knitting trouble. Something that was supposed to be simple ends up being a bit more complicated.

I also thought that with all the cable knitting I've done, I don't own any of it myself. I've given it all away. What I knew at this point was that I wanted a V-neck Aran cardigan for me, in worsted weight, with some combination of patterns resembling, but not identical to, those in the Paton's design.

So I went to a couple of local yarn stores in search of a nice worsted-weight wool that was light enough to show texture patterns and dark enough to be practical in my life. There's a skein of what I ended up with in that photo. It's Cascade 220 (again), color 9336. Brown Sheep's worsted was a close contender, and might have come out in first place if the shop had had enough skeins of any of the colors I wanted to use; someone else had gotten there ahead of me on the blues, purples, and greens and the shop hadn't had time to restock.

Good sign: I didn't get a bag for my purchases. I just carried my skeins (and the buttons for another garment) in my arms. As I was just outside the door of the shop, two people I didn't know at all asked if the yarn was going to be turned into something for me, because, as they said, "It's a great color for you."

Next I needed to wind the skeins into balls (I let the shop wind the first one for me, and I'll do the rest during family-and-friends visiting times). And I needed to look for a substitute cable.

I pulled out a bunch of my standard pattern references and my sticky notes.

I wanted a cable panel that felt as classic as the original, and that wasn't going to be boring (I have to watch out for this "not boring" inclination: my "carryaround, easy" knitting projects can too readily become "need to pay attention all the time" endeavors . . . there's a fine line between not-boring and much-brain-required).

Several of the books offered promising alternatives, but nothing felt right. I'm going to be working with some Elsebeth Lavold ideas for the embellishment of my daughter's (first) sweater and there's another Lavold design that I bought the pattern for last week . . . but I want to spin the yarn for that one, which means it probably won't get done for at least a year. So, in the interest of variety, I leaned away from Lavold-inspired options. I've been wanting to work a bunch of the patterns from the Japanese book, but the ones that I found most appealing kept pushing me in the direction of a totally different sweater concept. Some of the stuff in Barbara Walker's compendium (cable-specific volume rather than design collections, because I wanted the hunt to be easy) was nice but. . . .

AH! Where's my brain? I have two of Janet Szabo's books right here, and if there's anyone who knows cables, and knows how they can be both classic and contemporary, it's Janet. So I pulled her books off the shelf and brewed a cup of tea.

Fast Lane, from Celestial Seasonings, because I've been feeling kind of dragged out lately (computer problems and more). Since my acupuncturist said "no coffee" (to a serious coffee lover), I've come to appreciate the return of Fast Lane. At certain moments, it's medicinal. (It's not the caffeine she wants me to avoid but the coffee oils, also found in decafs.)

Meanwhile, I had knitted a first swatch and it's lying there drying. I knitted most of it in a darkened Cinema Savers theater while watching a bit of amusing fluff called Penelope with my daughter and some family friends. The swatch was simple enough. Stockinette.

Janet's Cables, Volume 1: The Basics is more comprehensive than the title sounds. There's lots of very cool stuff in it about how cables work. I'm looking forward to seeing what Janet comes up with in the next volume, although there's plenty here to keep me busy until she has it ready. And I'm looking through her Aran Sweater Design to see what kinds of ideas it gives me as well.

I had thought I would just replace the main cable, but now I'm thinking of that whole canvas of front cable panels . . . and I thought I'd keep the side edges of the cardigan in Irish moss stitch, but Janet's got some neat texture patterns that I'd like to try. . . .

In order to maintain this project's "carryaround, easy" status, I'll need to be really careful about which components I choose to combine. I'll be especially vigilant (I hope!) about being sure that the cable crossings occur on similar rows (or rounds, if I decide to steek, although I may not . . . this shows that I am already thinking of working the body all in one, instead of in three pieces; now, exactly what parts of the Must Have Cardigan am I using? . . . to be determined).

No, I wasn't born knowing how to do all this pattern modification. I learned it largely by trial and error over a number of years, but the thinking process that leads to my ability to make small (or large) modifications to patterns (or to launch into a design without them) comes directly from the lineage of traditional or ethnic knitting.

My strong belief in the power of the skills that come from understanding traditional and ethnic knitting is the reason that I publish the books that I do.

And where the path on this particular sweater will come out is anybody's guess right now. But I know I'll end up with a sweater that isn't just half-right. It'll be all the way right (or close enough to all the way right . . . I aim for perfection, but often take some risks that keep me from achieving it). And I'll undoubtedly learn something I didn't know before I started down this path. Which was supposed to be simple. And will undoubtedly be interesting. And may take a while.

• Aran-style.
• V-neck.
• Cardigan.
• Worsted-weight yarn.
• Similar combination of panels.
• Set-in sleeves.
• Bike.
  

Maggie Casey's new book: Start Spinning

Well, hallelujah! A wonderful, inspiring new introductory overview of spinning is now available. While many titles on handspinning have recently been published (that's very good . . . and, as a long-time spinner and the former editor of Spin-Off magazine [1988–early 2000], I enjoy checking them out), few have been as remarkable as Maggie Casey's Start Spinning: Everything You Need to Know to Make Great Yarn. This treasure, just published by Interweave Press, will get new spinners set up solidly and will give more experienced spinners a chance to say, "YES!"

While you'll still want to take a class or workshop with Maggie if she's within your traveling distance, the book manages to transmit a nice portion of Maggie's calm, focused wisdom in printed form. (Maggie is teaching in person at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in late April/early May and at the Estes Park Wool Market in mid-June; she's also a co-owner and instructor at Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins in Boulder, Colorado.)

In Start Spinning, Maggie covers all the necessary points, with just the right details—not too many, but not too few, either. Information, organization, and tone are all just right: A two-page section on troubleshooting for wheel spinning begins, "If you feel like you're fighting with your wheel instead of working in partnership with it, keep this in mind. . . . It is always the wheel." (Page 52.)

The book's major emphasis is on wool, which for contemporary spinners in North America (and lots of other places) is the default fiber . . . and it's a great and logical place to start, even though in some locations and times other fibers have been the beginner material.

(Like, for example, cotton. . . . Some folks may find this difficult to believe, but historically many spinners have learned with cotton. With the right preparation, tools, and expectations, there's no reason not to start with what you've got.)

The photography and book design enhance the material. The photos are simple and show what they need to with grace and clarity. One of the things I noticed immediately is that the photos feature beginner, proficient-spinner, and novelty yarns of many fibers and constructions, often within the same picture.

This is, in my mind, a huge plus. A number of the recent spinning books show only thick-and-thin yarns (or fun but structurally questionable novelties . . . not all novelties are structurally questionable, of course). Many older books and spinning periodicals show only extremely even, fine yarns. The first situation, while appealing in the textural and "you can do this!" dimensions, doesn't encourage spinners to increase their skills so they can spin any yarn they want . . . and thick-and-thin or funky-novelty yarns are fun some of the time, but not all of the time. They're often not very versatile to work with when you want to actually make something. The second situation, of showing only the most masterfully spun yarns, can be completely intimidating. I think that irregular yarns can be beautiful, and that evenly spun yarns can be exquisite. It's nice to see yarns of a broad range of types nestled happily together. You might call this "yarn diversity" in action . . . and all of the yarns shown look like they'd be nice on the needles or hook or shuttle as well as in the skein or ball.

In the body of the book, Maggie talks about both spindles and wheels. She demonstrates spinning from the prepared fibers that most beginning spinners today will start with, but there's a lovely appendix that gives framework for understanding wool types along with information on choosing and preparing a fleece. She pinpoints the reason spinners choose to start with raw material: it's "the difference between a meal prepared at home and dorm food."

Quibbles, all the size of grains of salt: A few copyediting glitches got through, mostly relating to the placement of punctuation; no one but another copyeditor is likely to notice (and Elizabeth Zimmermann's last name has only one N on page 92 . . . this is possibly the most common typo in knitting-related books and magazines). As I recall (I'm writing at the library), all the wheels in the photos are double-treadle; there are a lot of single-treadle wheels around as well. Due to production vagaries, the driveband is partly invisible in a photo that's used more than once (first on page 29). The description of how to start a wheel, "Start with the footman in the one o'clock position," shown with a Lendrum, may be a bit confusing to a total neophyte, who may not know that the part of the footman that's supposed to be in that position is its upper attachment point, and the idea might be even more difficult to understand for someone who has a double-footman Saxony-style wheel (like the one shown in that lefthand photo on page 29 . . . actually, for any Saxony-style wheel it's hard to figure out where "one o'clock" is). Changing drive bands is mentioned as a possible necessity on page 53, but the cross-reference page, 38, doesn't tell how . . . the information does appear in the back of the book. Maggie apparently sometimes walks on the wild side with her skeins by using two ties with small amounts of yarn, although she generally recommends four. I never use less than three . . . especially with small amounts of yarn, which in my experience are even more likely to get messed up than large skeins. "Bird's nest" needs to be in the index (it's on page 14, and the mention on page 81 is the reason it needs to be indexed). Overall, the index could have been more thorough; however, the book is small and well-written enough that I suggest just sidestepping the index issue by reading the whole thing through and flagging items of personal interest with sticky notes.

In sum: This is a FANTASTIC book. If you have been thinking about learning to spin, this is a superb place to start. If you've already been spinning for a while, connect with it to fill in any gaps in your foundation. Maggie and I have different carding techniques . . . they both work . . . and otherwise I read through the entire text thinking, "Yes, exactly. That's what I think, too. Oh, good! She presented that the way I'd want to if I were doing this. . . ."

It's sort of weird to find that another spinner, whom I've known for a number of years but with whom I've never had the opportunity to actually sit and spin or talk about spinning, has developed an approach to spinning, and to teaching beginners to spin, that is so similar to mine. Of course, Maggie's actually teaching classes . . . and I've mostly been involved with publishing instead of teaching since I moved to Colorado from Massachusetts, where I did teach spinning on a regular basis. So I haven't been of much use as a direct instructor for a lot of years. My energy's been channeled into putting information into print. Although the desired end results are similar, the activities for getting there are extremely different: like the difference between getting some place on a bike versus on a train (sometimes I think teaching is the bike and publishing is the train, sometimes vice versa; it doesn't matter which corresponds to which).

I am so glad Maggie has written this book, which gets exceptionally close to putting three dimensions into two. She made me miss teaching (although I think I need to stick with the publishing), and also made me wish I'd been able to take her classes when I discovered yarn-making. My introductory spinning was trial-and-error, largely guided by Elsie Davenport's Your Handspinning (a great book that would not compete effectively in today's market) and with a bunch of fellow learners as support. In many ways, it was a fine way to learn to spin, but I wasted a lot of time (years, actually) discovering the hard way things that Maggie explains beautifully in a few pages.

And so, in two words, Start here!

______

NOTE: There's a picture up there! This post is not about computers! PCConnection is wonderful!

PCConnection got me the exchange computer about two weeks faster than I expected to receive it, and it arrived with the extra RAM not only installed (I'd said I could do that, easily) but also checked out. I want to be sure to acknowledge all this before I rocket right back into publishing and spinning and knitting, all of which has been in computer-failure-enforced slow motion for weeks.

I haven't got all the software loaded onto the new machine, but the big stuff I couldn't get to work on the other computers (the one that glitched and the first replacement machine) has been installed and a few of my documents are in place. It takes the better part of a day to download and install updates for the Microsoft software, and just over half a day to install, update, and the spend time on the phone activating the Adobe suite, so I'm glad to be through those passages (again).

Ah, the first computer has also arrived back, two days after the second PCConnection shipment arrived, and will be moved to my daughter's office area to handle image processing for the next book. Which is now more than a month behind, because of my computer problems.

Over the past several weeks, I have begun to wonder whether something in my personal aura (or magnetic field, or whatever) was toxic to computers. Fortunately, that does not appear to be the case. The new/exchange machine is doing just fine. And an e-mail I received yesterday indicates that the tech folks at PCConnection are also experiencing some odd behavior with the returned unit. This seems to further suggest that it wasn't just me. Whew.

Computer problems: Much better than a toothache

Still no pictures here.

Computer saga, with perspective

As Buddhist monk and simply wise-person-in-many-dimensions Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the good thing about a toothache is that it teaches us how nice it is not to have a toothache. I extend this teaching to the understanding that a mess of computer problems is also much less painful than a toothache, and working computers are much more convenient than malfunctioning computers.

To recap, with some updates:

• The original computer (code name A3) that was doing strange things was sent back to the manufacturer (after many days of online and phone contact with tech support and many drastic actions here). I've received an e-mail saying it will be back some time in the middle of next week, although no human communication to indicate what the problem might have been. The assumption is that the problem has been fixed. This computer will now become my daughter's, thus improving and speeding up her work with the Nomad Press images (she is using a nine-year-old P3, 448MHz, maxed out at 768MB RAM, code D1; she will have a two-year-old P4, 3.0GHz, 4MB RAM, that being A3).
• The replacement computer (A5) I ordered for myself arrived and after six days (including many drastic actions like restoring factory defaults three times) was shipped back to the source. I don't know whether that particular machine is a lemon or whether some of the non-essential software was interfering with the installation of the software I need to run, but PCConnection graciously agreed that it was time to give up on it.
• The exchange computer (H6) that I ordered was listed as "ships in 2+ weeks," which was really bad news but after another day of research it looked so much like the best alternative that I figured I'd just have to tough it out for another two weeks. The great news here is that my call to one of the manufacturers to ask questions about my specific needs connected me to a young woman named Cressida in the sales department. I said, "I do print publishing. I tend to have InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator open simultaneously, and I put together large files that may contain as many as 600 linked images." Cressida said, "Ah, I know your problem. I'm a graphic designer." ! She steered me away from both computers I was considering and toward another, saying, "THIS is what you need." It's no more expensive than the ones on my list. So I ordered it, thinking that I'd limp through the waiting period by installing the most essential programs temporarily on the laptop, which is a Linux machine but does have a small XP (Home) partition on it.
• However, the laptop (T4) has only 256MB of RAM (it was bought to run Linux, after all; it didn't need much RAM . . . which puts me in mind of my first computer, which did very nicely with 64KB of RAM, although of course it didn't multitask). Adobe Creative Suite 2 requires a minimum of 384MB to install. There are ways to force the Adobe installer to work with less RAM (as little as 100MB), but even if I did that it's not like I could then open an InDesign file for a heavily illustrated book. The laptop is upgradeable. The RAM for it, ordered at 3:30 on Thursday afternoon for overnight delivery (extra cost), will, through the peculiarities of order handling and shipping, arrive by overnight standard delivery by 3 p.m. on Monday. Oddly, if I'd chosen regular shipping (USPS, probably Priority Mail) it would most likely be here now. Oh, well. (According to the tracking number, it arrived in town at 5 this morning, but it's not like FedEx would let me drive out to the depot and pick it up. The depot is closed.)

I have written in my head, but not gotten onto this blog, several posts on how it's a miracle that any small business survives. This is just one of many of the amazing types of hurdles that small businesses deal with every day.

Taxes are due in ten days, too.

Knitting helps

So yesterday I left town. Sometimes it's good to just change the view completely.

I went to Denver for three other errands, listening to Thich Nhat Hanh while I drove.

Along the way, I got to visit A Knitted Peace for the first time, and there was a Habu trunk show going on. Very cool stuff, including two pieces I might even wear . . . although I don't get dressed up enough that I'd use them more than once a year.

I learned about String too late for a visit. Next time.

After my errands, I ended up at the Tattered Cover on the way-south-end of the metropolitan area for Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's road tour appearance. I sat near the back, next to Erynn and and Isaac and Isaiah, whose photos are on Stephanie's blog, as well as two Wyoming folks who'd driven 4.5 hours to be there (one of whom I knew from Cyndi Lee's knitting circles at the Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park . . . nice to see, and visit at length with, someone I knew!). I also got to briefly see Amy Clarke Moore and her daughter Hannah, a child whom I had only previously seen in photos. If there were a cutest kid contest and Hannah was in it, the other kids would all be very worried and might even go home, no matter how cute they were.

Stephanie is, of course, very talented both on the page and in person, putting together excellent humor and thoughtful content, and I brought home a copy of her new book, Things I Learned from Knitting (Whether I Wanted to or Not), which will be very sanity-inducing to read while I am waiting for my current band-aid computer (D2) to load Firefox (4 minutes), move an e-mail message to a folder (30 seconds to 2 minutes) or pick up mail (20 minutes or more, although I usually leave the room during mail pick-ups).

During the Yarn Harlot event, I finished the hand-dyed rayon Landscape Shawl variation (based on Evelyn Clark's pattern), with 1.5 inches (3.75 cm) of yarn to spare. Photos when possible.

I have also finished my acupuncturist's cotton chenille cardigan. When I left for Denver, it was drying on a towel after its initial washing.

Sometimes knitting progresses when other things don't.

Shifting sands in the publishing world

In another development this week, Amazon is attempting to force authors and publishers who use print-on-demand (POD) printing technology to use the printing service that Amazon owns to produce copies sold through Amazon. If the publishers and authors don't agree to this change, their books' "buy" buttons on Amazon will be disabled. Amazon is also setting the pricing and discount structures for the sale of these copies. Although Nomad Press doesn't produce its books with this technology and is not affected by this move, we have been vulnerable to other Amazon policy changes. "Amazon is attempting" means, essentially, "Amazon is doing this." They do hold nearly all the cards in the game they're playing.

Some very good news conveyed by e-mail

My copy of Stephanie's book is unsigned. The south-end Tattered Cover is very far from my home, so I left without waiting in line, although I sent hello-and-hang-in-there-on-the-tour-blitz messages to her with friends. I got home before 11:30 p.m. but didn't turn on my computer. It would have taken most of an hour to retrieve e-mail.

When I fired up the old machine (D2) this morning, I discovered the following lovely message from my stalwart primary contact in the technical solutions (I think "solutions" is much better than "support") department at PCConnection, with reference to the "ships in 2+ weeks" exchange computer that was plugged into their ordering system for me late on Thursday:

• "Deb, The units are due in today. John"

! ! ! !

I think that counts as a miracle, right up there with completing the shawl and the cardigan within inches of the last of their yarns.

I'm such a grump about editing (it's a terrific book anyway)

Okay, here's the short version: Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, is well worth reading.

(There'd be a photo here, except that I still don't have a computer that lets me process photos. I hope to be back in the loop by the end of the week . . . the replacement machine is due on Wednesday, and then I can start putting my software tools back in place.)

And here's the long version: I'm an incredible grump about language usage, and Three Cups of Tea is a splendid book in spite of, rather than because of, the level of care it received in the editorial process.

The basic positives

Greg Mortenson is the subject of the book, which is told in third person (about Greg Mortenson) by writer David Oliver Relin, who did an excellent job of tackling and relating a complex story. Mortenson gave Relin access to vast quantities of information, and the freedom to portray the subject in all its human and political complexity. Relin, whose background in both writing and life experience made him a superb collaborator on this project, constructed a sound narrative structure, got the chapters to flow well into each other, and incorporated background  information efficiently when it was needed. The more challenging step called developmental editing was successfully navigated by the author either working solo or in conjunction with a conceptual adviser (most likely, in today's publishing climate, the former). For that: bravo.

The story is worth reading and the work for which Mortenson is the catalyst is some of the most valuable (and gutsy) being done on the face of the earth. There's a lot here about following instincts and having faith and being flexible and not giving up--all conveyed through examples, not platitudes. Read it to hear about someone else's one-step-at-a-time mission to make the world a better place. Read it for tips on how to keep going with your own one one-step-at-a-time mission to make the world a better place, whatever that mission may be. (Mine, for better or worse, is writing and publishing, mostly about traditional textile crafts.)

The language grump's two-bits' worth

It's too bad the publisher's editorial department didn't take slightly sharper pencils to some of the important minutiae of the manuscript.

If the editors had done a bit more thorough job, the reader would have been spared some imprecise word choices. I didn't mark them while I was reading, but here are a couple of examples, one relocated and one just remembered:

• An airport scene: "But the level of panic in the stale air was palpable, as inaudible voices echoed through the terminal, announcing delay after delay." (Page 98.) While palpable comes from a root that means "able to be touched," the word's meaning has expanded to mean "evident" in ways that are not directly tangible; that word choice is marginal. The word that blows that sentence completely away is inaudible. Something that's inaudible can't be heard. If something that's inaudible does echo, no one will notice. I think, therefore, that the inaudible announcement of delay after delay would not increase panic. I think one possible word that might have worked better where inaudible appears is unintelligible, although even then people would not react . . . if they didn't understand, how could they? And I wonder: was it really panic that the crowd was experiencing? Admittedly, it was Christmas and people wanted to catch flights to see relatives. But were they caught up in "sudden fear . . . causing hysterical or irrational behavior"? Or were they perhaps experiencing a mix of frustration, anxiety, anger, resignation, and, perhaps in a few, despair? I would have taken this sentence back to the drawing board. The version that was printed was what I call a "placeholder": good enough for a working draft, but not for the final description.
  
• A reference to "the tenants of Islam," when I think what was meant was the tenets (opinions, doctrines, or principles) and not the tenants (those who pay rent to occupy a space).

The editorial staff might also have cleaned up overwrought, and occasionally mixed, metaphors. They might have straightened out sentences where modifying phrases had slipped out of position. These peculiarities might have been given an editorial pass as quirks of the writer's style, and it does take longer to edit this way than it does to just hit the surface of the text with a blue pencil. However, I think it would have been worthwhile to pay this much attention to the manuscript. I had to read a number of sentences more than once to untangle them, and I found that the personification of mountains and sky, in particular, distracted me from the story instead of enhancing my understanding.

A solid proofreading would have caught a handful of minor glitches, mostly missing letters that  left in place actual words that were not the ones that needed to be there (like "you" instead of "your").

Imprecise words, awkward metaphors, and typographical errors do, alas, cloud meaning and distract the reader from the important information that's being presented. Inaccurate word selection can, in the worst cases, threaten the plausibility of the story being told. While this is not a "worst case," the narrative in Three Cups of Tea deserved, and still deserves, the absolutely highest standards of diction and clarity.

I'm sorry the editorial process did not provide that.

I don't hold the author accountable for these problems. Telling a story of this magnitude requires an extensive set of skills, which he obviously has. He almost certainly wrote under pressure from a deadline that did not permit a lot of reflection (although he managed that) or revision. He reached (and sometimes overreached) for ways to bring the landscape and the political and human forces to life on the page.

Someone who does that and produces an integrated and successful piece of work deserves the help of an editorial staff that will give the project an equal amount of dedicated attention. I'm sorry that didn't happen.

Great story . . . despite the editorial lapses

The title comes from a statement attributed to Haji Ali, the chief of the Pakistani village of Korphe, where Greg Mortenson built the first of many local projects to bring education and self-sufficiency to people in rural areas of Central Asia. As Haji Ali explained, "Here we drink three cups of tea to do business: the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family—and for our family we are prepared to do anything—even die."

Mortenson traveled to the area as a climber, intent on summitting K2. Due to some of the main problems that can occur in mountaineering, he didn't achieve that goal. He ended up lost on descent, spent a night in the open, and became "found" again in the village of Korphe. He vowed that he would come back to build a school.

He kept that vow, and continues with related work in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, including areas from which even Doctors without Borders has withdrawn its services because of the danger (following the killing of five of its aid workers).

If you haven't read the book, do. You won't regret it.

N.B.: I'm not perfect, either

It's true, I've been editing stuff for decades. It's also true that nothing I have ever shepherded into print has ever been perfect (no, wait, there was one magazine article that was perfect . . . it was in 1998 . . . ). And it's also true that the attention to detail that I consider appropriate has not always been the level of detail that my employers have thought was necessary. (I sidestep this problem now by working for myself.)

However, it's also true that the standard I'm describing is always the one I do my human best to grab hold of and hang onto.

Copyright infringement, another opinion: Should we independents "retire" in defeat?

I've received another comment to which I was composing a too-long response, so it's turning into a post of its own.

The topic is copyright infringement and the comment came in on this post.

Here's Michelle's comment:

Ladies, as much as I understand your frustration I wish to respond in a way that is not as supportive as other entries on this page. I am sorry to say that technology is going to grow with or without you. Anyone who expects a business to be protected against website publishing is probably around retirement age. If properly blanketed by a solid, reputable publisher the chances of protection are closer to a guarantee. Perhaps you should invest more time in researching publishers rather than letting everyone know something they already do. We know you have to eat and we know how unfair people can be. Move with the times or retire gals.

And here's my reply:

Hi, Michelle:

The problem is not "website publishing" but stealing of copyrighted material, whether intentional or not.

As a publisher, I have choices about how to present the information that I make available to other people. I publish this primarily through print media, although I certainly evaluate my options on an ongoing basis and have been considering electronic delivery for some future projects.

At present, print still seems like the best way to provide knitting-related information of any length and complexity.

Making the material available exclusively electronically (which I assume is part of what you mean by "technology is going to grow with or without you") would obviate many difficulties of the current print-publishing system, including freight costs, damages and returns, and the other inefficiencies and expenses of today's book distribution, which is, frankly, not in step with the times at all. However, it is a reality as much as is the technology of electronic communication.

Electronic books are not yet easy to read for extended text, and the equipment to display many of the currently available formats is still financially out of many people's reach. PDFs can be displayed on standard computers, to which many people do have access. However, computer-only display of books means the text isn't as portable as a traditional book—no reading on buses or subways, in bed, and so on; even laptops are not yet noticeably convenient in these locations. I think that most readers would consider it an imposition (and not very satisfactory) to have to print out and make some sort of binding for their own copies of books that are several hundred pages long, and that's what they'd have to do to get the flexibility of a bound book from an electronic delivery system. In addition, electronic distribution doesn't solve the problem of piracy, and may make it worse.

I obviously think that not publishing the books that I do would be a loss for the knitting and spinning community, or I wouldn't be doing it, but perhaps that's my personal delusion.

Then again, I'm far from alone. A number of knitting designers (who are not publishers but writers and providers of patterns) are struggling with issues similar to those faced by publishers like me: how best to deliver the information, how best to get paid for the work that gets done to create and present the information. If these problems don't get solved, then these sources of material will dry up. The people who are writing, designing, and publishing (through our own efforts or through association with others) will find a different kind of work to do.

What you are saying, as I understand it, is that the only people who should be publishing books (or providing pattern designs, and so on) are those who are well-funded enough to have a flotilla of lawyers at their command. That goes against a lot of ideas I care a great deal about—including free speech and free enterprise and being able to choose to work in a basement that I own rather than a cubicle that someone else does.

I know I'm paraphrasing you, but this is what I am hearing in your message: "Life's not fair. No one should act unless that person has lots of money to defend him or herself. Also, you must be old and you should retire." Each of these declarations, whether true or not, misses the point of the primary issue under discussion.

I don't think the problems of copyright infringement have anything to do with age. Young or old, creative people need food, shelter, and clothing, just like corporate drones do. It does sound like you want us all to be corporate drones or to leave the workforce entirely. I put the word "retire" in quotes in the title of this post because "retire" isn't an option for most of the people I know who are doing this work. We need to work for a living, so our only "retirement" would be from doing work that we are unusually qualified to do, and that would not be an age-related decision. I suspect that some of the older people in this field may be active on matters of copyright protection not only for their own sake but also in order to protect future options for the younger folks. And while you address the group as "ladies," not everyone implicated by these issues is female.

Life's unfair—you're right. And no one here has asked it to be.

Yet unfairness may run rampant if we don't name it, and people won't stop doing things that are unfair—or wrong, or illegal—unless and until we do some acknowledging and some educating. When you say "technology is going to grow with you or without you," you may also mean that we should not bother to do whatever is in our power to increase the amount of fairness in the world. Unfair behavior won't go away completely no matter what we do, but simply to succumb to unfairness by saying that nothing can be done about it is defeatist. Inaction also has long-term, serious, negative consequences.

Your statement suggests that "solid, reputable publishers" are either immune to piracy or better able to protect themselves from it. I assume, because of the context of this discussion, that by "solid, reputable publishers" you do not mean the independents but you do mean the imprints of the conglomerates. It is not true that they are immune to piracy, and they may be even less able to protect themselves in some ways. Although the bigger publishers may have lawyers on staff (some do), they also have more titles to keep track of. And if the editors at those corporations cannot produce P&Ls (profit-and-loss statements) that come out in the black more often than not, then their publishing wings will be clipped as well. Those editors, the creative spirits of the publishing houses where they work, will be required to do something else. The big publishers' P&Ls are affected by copyright infringement, as are the P&Ls of the smaller publishers.

Then again, maybe the ability to create new ideas and to share them through publication and to earn a living or a partial living for one's effort doesn't matter—maybe it doesn't matter to you, and maybe it doesn't even matter to human cultural heritage as a whole.

I think it does, and I'm willing to take a stand for it.

The truly positive news that has come out of the discovery of illegally scanned books' availability on the internet is that there are people who would like to have access to this information who apparently cannot obtain it easily and legally. I'd love to find a solution to that problem, whether the fix is electronic or physical. I'm all about supporting creativity, whether of those who provide information or those who use it to spur their own unique projects.

I think that every one of us stands on both sides of that gate from time to time. The trick is in making sure we can see over to the other side, regardless of where we're standing at the moment.

Deb

R & R (& R? M?): Reading, rest, and . . .

Sometimes I just need to stop. That's usually when the workload seems impossible and both spirit and body begin to flag.

Reading helps. Acting as if I were sick helps (staying on the couch or in bed, napping, doing all the things that I'd do if I were really sick, although usually for many fewer days than if the bug caught on for real). I'm usually reminded to do this sort of thing by "start of a cold" signals, which I've been dealing with. And I need to sing in a concert this Friday, so it's a bad time to actually succumb (as if there were a good time).

So I rested all weekend (and should be still; I'm attempting to go at half-speed).

And I read: The Fresco, by Sheri S. Tepper, recommended by my daughter, and The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Clifford Stoll. The first is a science fiction novel, and I enjoyed it. It's complex, with decent characterization and intriguing plot twists. The second is an older book (1989) about tracking computer hackers ("hackers" in the negative sense) that's still relevant and interesting. It was even more of a cliffhanger to read than The Fresco.

I also knitted a bit on the variant I'm making of Evelyn Clark's Landscape shawl, in gifted-to-me Textiles A Mano yarn:

The parenthetical R? or M? in the title of this post is about the felted catnip mice from Donna Druchunas' Kitty Knits, which are about to be shipped to their new homes. They've been delayed by the need to knit and felt two more (the green ones) and a slight delay to determine (as far as I can tell) whether anyone is likely to get in trouble if I ship catnip across the U.S. border (I don't think so, but section 138 of the International Mail Manual tells me I can ship live bees or fully desiccated lizards, and explains how to pack eggs for mailing; it's okay to send live leeches, too . . . oh, and silkworms . . . that might actually be useful). The mice will need to be mailed directly from the post office and I want to get them all in one trip.

The felting, by the way, has taken place through the highly controlled and scientific method of throwing knitted-and-assembled-but-not-stuffed mouse forms in the washer and dryer with a load of towels and jeans. The two green mice were in a different load than the first six and felted a bit smaller and more tightly. When I saw them, I wondered if the first batch were really Rattus spp., but I have known some rats (white) and the profiles are not rat-like. So I think they are just big Mus spp. Fuzzy rodents, regardless. Of a friendly, useful, and nondestructive species, in this case.

I suspect the green mice will be a bit tougher than the less firmly felted versions, so I've reserved them for two cat-recipients in particular: my mother's formerly feral kit (who may or may not be interested . . . he needs to learn to play, instead of attacking her furniture and rugs) and Mr. A., who is notorious for fiber-destructive tendencies. With Mr. A., the sturdier mouse may last a few seconds longer than one of the others.

___

A friend has just told me that the essay I wrote quite a while ago for the NPR-based "This I Believe" project has just turned up in "The Essay Shuffle" on the "This I Believe" web site. I thought that piece of writing had dropped into the deep, dark crater of oblivion. Apparently not. With luck, the first link (to my essay) will still work when the shuffle moves on to other people's essays.

Blog tour: Kitty Knits, with a guest appearance by our ancient cat

Donna Druchunas has a new book out from Martingale Press: Kitty Knits: Projects for Cats and Their People. I'm part of the blog tour, and we've been asked to talk about our cats. Ms. Bit will thus be making quite an appearance in a moment, but right now here's what the book looks like, and I have a small story to tell about how part of it came together.

As Nomad Press, I publish some of Donna's books—those that are on traditional and ethnic knitting and that don't (so far) require color printing. (Nomad may be able to do color in the future, but currently doesn't for both environmental and financial reasons. So we're glad to see Donna's work that needs color coming out from other presses.)

Anyway, that lovely pink sweater on the cover was threatened with not being in the manuscript for this book, for several reasons. So I ended up helping Donna tech edit the pattern (she was at one of those "I'm tired of looking at this" stages we all reach) and then, when the project was at risk of being cut because time was running out and there was no model garment, I volunteered to knit the body. Another knitter did the sleeves, and Donna assembled the pieces and added the trim and embroidery. It's not at all my style or color of sweater, which made it fun to knit.

It's nice to see it (1) finished and (2) looking so fine there on the cover.

For the work, Donna swapped me a outdated but still perfectly useful digital camera so I could play with getting this blog started. I've since gotten a different camera that doesn't store its images on 3.5-inch diskettes, but by being able to use that one (which Donna's husband Dom used to take the Alaska photos for Arctic Lace ) I learned that I did like doing the pictures and the blog.

Here's another project from the book, being modeled by Donna's older cat:

And, finally because the Empress of the Universe always gets star billing, here is our 20.75-year-old cat, Little Bit (who was named before we had any way to know she would stay small, which she certainly did):

She's checking out a half-dozen of the felted mice from Kitty Knits. The purple one must have run out of the photo.

Here are all the mice the day before, in unfelted and unstuffed form:

They're made from leftover scraps of Brown Sheep wool, Cascade 220, and Lion Brand Lion Wool. (Are they a quick knit? I didn't have time to make a phone call this week to schedule an essential appointment, but in bits of time that were otherwise semi-occupied, I made these six mice. I threw them in the washer with a load of towels, dumped the whole lot in the dryer, and what came out is what you see, now stuffed and catnipped. They don't have eyes or noses yet, but they will.)

Want one of these mice for your cat? If you're one of the first six people to request one in the comments, I'll send you one. Let me know if you have color preferences, although I can't guarantee first choices (pink, red, white, greenish-heather, bright blue, purple). 3/3/08 All six have been spoken for! If you missed the opportunity, they are really quick to knit from Donna's instructions. The shaping is great. They'd be a super project to teach someone techniques with, too (you or someone else).

Ms. Bit likes the mice, but prefers to harrass the dogs. Due to her advanced age, she gets away with more than she used to. She confuses Tussah:

by coming in right under the dog's nose to eat the Wrong Kind of Chow:

Tussah has been taught not to growl, with reassurances that there is plenty more chow for everyone. Note the gray-sock-clad toe tipping the bowl at the perfect angle in BOTH photos. That isn't me.

The fluff on the carpet and the piles of papers and books are, however, my fault. I'm in the middle of yet another project with impossible deadlines. It got a little messier than usual around here last weekend.

The Empress was not, however, inconvenienced, so all was well.

Naptime.

Copyright infringement: Response to a comment

I was writing a response to a comment a reader left on one of my posts about the copyright infringement and my remarks seemed to get pretty long, so I'm turning them into a post.

Here's the comment:

Hi, I was watching the debate from the other side of the fence - I'm from Poland and have seen the Picasa galleries with scans, as they are plentiful and from all around the world. I enjoyed them. Why? First and foremost, because the stuff scanned is not available in Poland. There are no libraries where I can borrow an English knitting book, there are no bookshops selling the knitting magazines from all over the world, so I can't even spend some time among the shelves, leafing through the pages. Believe me - if I could, I'd gladly pay for my own copy, to hold and cherish, and make notes on the margins when I convert inches into centimetres. And I'm not the only one. The books are the lesser problem, with amazon.com - if you want something, you can buy it, especially now. But the magazines? Can you find a solution to this conundrum? There are beautiful pictures of patterns published online, you want to buy a copy of a magazine, you are a holder of a valid Visa card, and then... it turns out you can't, because they don't ship outside US and Canada. That's the Vogue Knitting case. I can't subscribe, no matter how much I want to. Then some of the US online shops don't accept credit cards issued in Poland.
Yes, publishing scans is piracy and stealing and I don't ask you to turn the blind eye and pretend the problem does not exist. Just try to understand that sometimes there is simply no other way to even see a design. And I guess that 99% of those who have visited the Picasa galleries would go out and buy the books and mags - if they could.
Please, don't rip me apart for this comment. Just try to put yourselves in our humble Polish shoes for a while, with three or four Polish knitting magazines available, an ocassional copy of VK available in the biggest bookshops in the country and publishing houses reluctant to publish anything that won't generate instant, enourmous profits. I personally can't see any easy solution, although I do understand and respect the action taken. I'd love to try and find at least a common point for discussion.
All the best, Jo.

And here's my response:

Hi, Jo:

I certainly wouldn't rip you apart for your comments! And I welcome your observations. We've got a similar problem in the other direction. While reviewing the sites with the books posted, I noticed two Russian books that I would love to have copies of. I tried to order them through several online channels as well as through the publishers' sites (in Russian . . . I read several languages, but Russian is not one of them!) and did not succeed.

I can't speak for the magazines. And Vogue, which you mentioned, is a very large publishing company. I can't speak for them, either.

I am one person who publishes a few books, one or two a year which is as fast as I can work, with graphics processing help from my daughter. We both work other jobs to pull this off, and we do without some things that other people take for granted in exchange for doing work we believe in.

It is possible to order the books that my small press publishes through Amazon. The books can also be ordered directly from my press's web site. Payment is via PayPal, which will accept international credit cards and currency, and I'll package the books myself and drive to the post office to ship them! I sure wish the postage costs were less . . . although our books can go in flat-rate envelopes by global priority mail. Amazon is probably more reasonable in terms of shipping and the current exchange rates. European yarn shops can, and some do, obtain our books through a wholesaler.

I'd love to have you be able to leaf through the books to see if you want to buy them before you get them, but at present the contracts with various easy-to-access providers who allow that are not okay for small publishers to sign, in my opinion. I keep trying to figure out a way around that one, but have not succeeded yet (in part because I don't have time to devote to hunting down a solution, or I can't afford the ones I have located). I buy knitting books sight-unseen myself, because the ones I am most interested in are also not in local bookstores or yarn shops (although there is one yarn shop about an hour from my house that does have a good supply of all sorts of things; I do get there a couple of times a year).

I'd love to come up with a different way to fix this: a way that perhaps publishers, large and small, could deliver their content digitally *and legally,* so the designers and editors and others could earn a bit of money for their efforts.

I'm delighted to try to put myself in your humble Polish shoes for a while, and appreciate your efforts to put yourself in our humble U.S. shoes, too! Some U.S. residents aren't humble (I'm sure some Polish ones aren't, either), but the knitting designers and at least the independent publishers (and the editors at the big houses) are doing this because we love it, not because it's the most effective way we could find to earn a living. We do have to make enough money to pay our bills at least minimally or we can't continue. And to keep doing our work, every cent (or grosz—do I have the smallest increment of currency right?) matters.

The articles, magazines, and books posted publicly are available to EVERYONE who has access to the internet. If everyone else gave their work away for free—doctors, grocers, house-builders, and the like—we could, too. But they don't.

One thought my daughter had was that if knitters in Poland wanted magazines or books on a regular basis that they could not obtain otherwise, they could perhaps arrange for knitters in countries that can obtain them to send them copies. Money could be transferred through PayPal. Maybe this could be set up through Ravelry or another network. Or maybe there's an opportunity for someone to set up a business importing these magazines and books. They could be pre-ordered and prepaid, so it wouldn't necessarily be a gamble. It's a thought. . . .

All best, Deb

P.S. We work to put metric conversions in our books whenever possible. There has only been one item so far that I haven't been able to convert; it was a concept based on yards per pound, and just didn't work out neatly in the metric system.

P.P.S. My press's web site is www.nomad-press.com . It is not quite up-to-date, because we haven't had time to work on it lately. We're working on the next book. . . .

3 of 3: Knitting in the Old Way and Ethnic Knitting Discovery: What's the difference?

This is the third in a series of posts comparing Priscilla GIbson-Roberts' Knitting in the Old Way (KITOW) and Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting Discovery.

The first two posts introduced this series and gave quick overviews of the original and revised editions of KITOW.

This post looks more closely at Ethnic Knitting Discovery, and then offers a few comments on the collection of books as a whole.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery

After Nomad Press released the revised edition of Knitting in the Old Way, we learned that some people are overwhelmed by all the possibilities in KITOW, or would like step-by-step help in getting from idea-in-head to garment-on-needles (or, better yet for some, to finished object). (Then again, many thousands of people liked KITOW exactly the way it was. It's just that we don't want any knitter to miss the delights of "knitting in the old way"!)

Our desire to make sure that contemporary knitters don't stay tied to line-by-line patterns (because we know how much fun it is to make your own knitting trails) is where the Ethnic Knitting series by Donna Druchunas comes in.

I remember exactly when Donna and I first talked bout this: it was several years ago, in a funky coffeehouse that no longer exists in Loveland, Colorado. A book is not an overnight project.

The Ethnic Knitting project is a series, with three volumes in the works. It was conceived as a progressive, integrated introduction to the

    way of thinking about knitting

embodied in Knitting in the Old Way, with explicit instructions. The Ethnic Knitting books are still not pattern books, but they act more like pattern books than KITOW does: you can fill in the blanks to make a pattern.

The Ethnic Knitting series is not entirely coordinated with Knitting in the Old Way, although the books are based on the same philosophy and there's some crossover.

The first in the series, Ethnic Knitting Discovery (EK Discovery), was published in October 2007. We're already in production for the second volume, Ethnic Knitting Exploration (EK Exploration), which is scheduled for October 2008. And we're also well underway with the third volume, Ethnic Knitting Adventure (EK Adventure).

Here's the cover of EK Discovery:

As you can tell from the subtitle, this book looks at the knitting traditions of four regions: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes. It also focuses on one basic sweater shape, with some variations: the drop-shoulder sweater (known in KITOW as gansey), with and without modifications like gussets, steeks, and very simple armhole shaping. EK Discovery looks at two traditions in terms of texture patterns (The Netherlands and Denmark) and two in terms of color-stranding (Norway and The Andes).

Each region is in a separate chapter that begins with a bit of history, a few techniques, and a handful of versatile pattern charts. Three project templates follow: one for a small, simple project that introduces the techniques (a scarf, a cap, a headband, or a change purse), and then two for pullover, drop-shoulder sweaters. (Later volumes will tackle other sweater shapes.)

Here's a quick overview of the information that's presented:

• The Netherlands: Working texture patterns in the round and back-and-forth, and the simplest sweater construction options.
• Denmark: Working more complex texture patterns, making welts, and adding gussets, plus working a fitted sweater profile.
• Norway: Working color patterns, and how to make stitch-and-cut armholes and necklines (KITOW's "modern Nordic" working method).
• The Andes: More color patterning, along with Andean-style knitting, edging knitted fabric with puntas (as a cast-on technique or applied to a finished edge), and making steeks.

Some of the structures and designs correlate closely to information in KITOW. For example, EK Discovery's Pullover with Single Motif (from The Netherlands) is structurally the same as KITOW's Dutch Fisherman's Sweater with Single Motif, although the anchor motif chart in EK Discovery is simpler than either of the motifs KITOW offers.

EK Discovery doesn't stick as closely to tradition as KITOW, while it honors the same roots. EK Discovery provides simplified approaches to some of its designs, using contemporary techniques. For instance, it offers a neat, self-finished square neckline for the Danish garments.

While the Ethnic Knitting series grows from the same soil as KITOW, it also looks into some new areas—like Andean-style knitting and the construction of puntas

Although the Ethnic Knitting series has been carefully planned to support people who are new to this type of knitting, it is not watered down! Heck, there are cut armholes and steeks in the first volume. (Haven't done this before? It's easy. . . . )

In the Ethnic Knitting series, each project is presented in worksheet formats with three levels of detail, from "I can work from a sketch" (close to KITOW's method) to "I like to get all my numbers together in one place" to "I like a fully detailed set of instructions." Because of the worksheets, readers can design their own sweaters from scratch while having help in remembering all the steps and navigating the transitions from each part to the next.

EK Exploration and EK Adventure will increase in complexity and will cover new geographic territory. EK Exploration travels through Lithuania (not a KITOW country, but one that links to Donna Druchunas' heritage), Iceland, and Ireland. It looks at raglans, circular yokes, and saddle-shoulder construction. It also tells how to turn any pullover into a cardigan (part of chapter 8 of the revised KITOW, approached from a different angle).

EK Adventure? Even more cool stuff, but we're keeping it under wraps until we're farther along with our work on it.

Which is the book for you (or for the friend you have in mind)?

As someone who's been knitting for a very long time, I love KITOW. It's a splendid desert-island knitting book. You could knit for several lifetimes with the information it contains.

I have also learned magical things from EK Discovery. I adore the puntas. I especially like the detailed instructions for the Danish garments. And my daughter is knitting her first-ever project based on EK Discovery's Pullover with Single Motif, although she's chosen a motif more like the God's-eye in KITOW and she's planning to steek the armholes.

EK Discovery has the nifty little projects, which I enjoy all on their own (I could get hooked on making variations of the Andean change purses).

KITOW lets you jump headfirst into simple designs (like speckled frocks) or complex ones, some incorporating crochet or intarsia. However, you may not realize initially that there are simple projects in KITOW, because of its comprehensive nature.

Leaf through both books at your local yarn or book shop, or by borrowing them from a library (interlibrary loan works great if your neighborhood doesn't have copies yet). See which has a project or idea that grabs you.

That's the book for you right now.

If you're evaluating for a friend, it's a matter of personality and of the stage that person is at in his or her knitting life: do you think this person needs an international smorgasbord (KITOW) or a series of carefully planned, nutritionally balanced meals from several different cuisines (EK Discovery)?