The Independent Stitch

Out of memory (not me this time)

We've used a number of methods to create the charts that go in the knitting books that Nomad Press has published so far.

For the revised edition of Knitting in the Old Way, we had access to Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' original ink drawings, and she was able to draw most of the new charts and sweaters that she wanted to add (there were a lot: twenty new ones after we thought we were all done!). So we scanned Priscilla's drawings and then spent literally hundreds of hours tweaking them in Photoshop (mostly cleaning the scans and removing anomalies) so they'd reproduce beautifully. They did.

This photo's taken of a printed book, in low light at night, with no flash, so it doesn't do the chart justice, but you may be able to see the hand-drawn quality as well as the clarity.

For Donna Druchunas' Arctic Lace and her just-released Ethnic Knitting Discovery, Donna gave us the charts already set up in David Xenakis' Knitter's Font. We moved them from Word to InDesign and kept going. For Ethnic Knitting Discovery, we did move them out to Illustrator and converted them to outlines when we were nearly done with the book.

I wrote a post on that process!

We've been working on the charts for a revised edition of Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Salish Indian Sweaters: A Pacific Northwest Tradition for several years. We thought we'd have been done (and the new book published) long ago. Not yet. The charts have been one big stumbling block.

The originals were no longer available. We scanned the charts as they were printed in the first edition, but discovered that the grid lines were irregularly crooked and there were a whole lot of other problems that would have been nearly impossible to fix.

Plus, of course, Priscilla had a pile of new designs to add. This is a random selection of the new stuff, some of which is traditional and some of which is Priscilla's original designs, using her own images in Cowichan style (like the cat right in the middle).

My office floor isn't big enough to include all of the new chart sketches, even though I've set these out so they're overlapped three deep in a few places. As I look at this snapshot, I don't even see the biggest of the two new enormous eagles . . . the "smaller" one is at the middle of the left edge. . . .

If we used had scans from the originals to "build" the new charts, it would have been insanely tedious and time-consuming. Actually, we put quite a bit of energy into doing just that. We decided to scrap all the work we'd done and start over.

But first we needed to learn enough about how to use Illustrator to pull off an entirely different approach. (Building these charts in the Knitter's Font would also have been prohibitively difficult.)

This past summer was, among other things, dedicated to adding just the right Illustrator skills to the Nomad Press repertoire. I took Jill Wolcott's online course. And Cat Bordhi generously shared not only tips but a working template that I was able to modify (using stuff Jill taught me) to do the job.

Then I started putting together a reference file of the charts that I was completing. And this started to happen:

That's the computer screen re-drawing SOOOO SLOOOOOWWWLLLYYYY that I could stop and take a picture between when I moved the cursor and when it managed to give me a clear new image of the page.

If I moved the cursor too far, for whole minutes at a time (possibly until I forced the computer to power down), the pages might look like this:

When this is what they were supposed to look like (this next image I got by exporting a PDF and converting it to a JPG to show the difference):

And too often the monitor looked like this:

Okay. What choice do I have?

After reducing the sizes of all files by eliminating any reference layers or other useful but nonessential data and changing the display characteristics without producing better results, the choice is "get more system memory."

 

So I tried this (new stuff is green, old stuff is black with silver clips):

And this (the modules have swapped positions):

And every other imaginable combination. Shifting modules, powering up, powering down, and so on took big chunks of three days, plus two sessions of live chat (Jon and Beckie) and four phone support calls, one to the computer manufacturer and three to the memory supplier (Jeff 1, Jeff 2, Enrique, and Jeff 1 again).

And we came to this:

. . . although there is hope at the other end because this return merchandise authorization represents a swap for RAM modules of the same description but different density (we can't tell the density of the originals because they're encased in steel . . . those silver clips hold it in place, and I'm not about to rip them apart to look).

So it was nice that we could spend the rest of the day pretending computers haven't been invented yet, but dogs have.

Ah, Halloween!

Reading notes: Extraordinary Knowing

I just read an interesting book. This isn't a proper review; it consists of a few reading notes. The book's borrowed from a distant library and (1) I need to return it and (2) I need to get on to other things.

The little rebellious exceptions of spooky action at a distance. . . .

Those phrases from this book blend an observation by William James with one by Albert Einstein, and they make me smile both as individal ideas and in the combination I've composed above.

The book: Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer (New York: Bantam, 2007). The paperback edition is due for release in February 2008.

The topic: unusual types of mental activity that may or may not exist (or exist as physically active forces), including clairvoyance, distant sensing, prayer, and the like.

I enjoyed reading it. Through it, the author, Elizabeth (Lisby) Mayer, has displayed an interesting mind. She was a psychologist who looked at inexplicable types of knowledge from a scientific perspective. Essentially, she talks about how we study ideas that are hard to study. She died of a chronic illness just after she had completed the manuscript; friends and colleagues pitched in and turned her notes on documentation into source notes.

The very good news is that she did complete the text. It's beautifully organized and clearly written. She listened to kids' observations and to experimental physicists' (and a lot of other people's) and gathered insights where she found them. She ranged comfortably between the simple and the complex. She asked more intelligent questions than she offered answers.

Here are a few snippets that I marked as I was reading, with a few contextual additions in brackets. The book itself is much more graceful to read than these excerpts may imply, although the thoughts they contain are some of the many that struck me as worth further contemplation.

• "Ambrose [Worrall; a faith healer in the mid-twentieth century] himself was a devout Christian, but when asked whether the people he healed needed to have faith, he replied, 'When I tell people faith matters, here's what I mean by faith—lack of resistance to what you hope is possible.' What's intriguing about his definition is how it locates faith as a subjective quality of mental experience. His answer is about humans, not God." [Source note: "People have reported varying versions of Worrall's definition of faith. My preference is for this one, though in The Gift of Healing he defines it as 'lack of resistance to that which you hope to receive' (196)."] (pages 169 and 284)
• "Models help us think. Without a conceptual home, observations that don't fit our existing models may be intriguing and entertaining, but they have the ultimate impact of writing on water. Without a model to contain them, we have no place to put new and unfamiliar things while we try to figure them out. . . . [W]e have real trouble thinking clearly, creatively, or for more than five minutes about things our models inform us are permanently homeless. . . . Part of the problem with creating a new model, I think, is that it has to account for data we're not used to considering data: feelings. . . . [Following an experience of anomalous cognition,] I had to doubt my existing models of reality or I had to doubt myself, the core sense of self that comes, [cognitive neuroscientist Antonio] Damasio tells us [in his book on consciousness, The Feeling of What Happens], when body, emotion, and idea merge to make consciousness." (page 214)
• "The vast preponderance of our mental life proceeds outside conscious awareness. We're perpetually and pervasively influenced by the prodigious force of unconscious mental processes. However, the distinction between conscious and unconscious is by no means absolute. . . . Over time, we've begun to mistake the content of the Freudian unconscious--repression of forbidden sexual impulses--for the insight itself. . . . By retaining that focus as the central truth of psychoanalysis, we've trivialized analysis as a clinical method but also as a theory of mind." (page 216)
• "Over the past two decades, experiments in cognitive neuroscience have repeatedly demonstrated that the overwhelming proportion of human mental activity occurs unconsciously. While those experiments don't let us directly observe mental activity that isn't conscious, they let us infer its presence and observe its fruits. . . . This has cause a humbling reappraisal of consciousness." (pages 216-217)
• "Soon Bob [Jahn] was giving me lessons in elementary post-Newtonian, post-Einsteinian physics. In return, I began telling him about current research on unconscious mental processes. . . . I'll never be a quantum physicist. Bob will never be a psychoanalyst. We're each deeply steeped in our own spheres of thinking, so deeply that we're barely aware of how they color everything we see. We're like fish unable to recognize water. But that means we each bring something unique and different to the other, something that geneticist Barbara McClintock called a 'feeling for the organism.' That kind of feeling, said McClintock, was what enabled her to win a Nobel Prize for her stunningly unexpected insights into the genetics of corn. As she explained to the flocks of reporters who asked how she'd done it, she knew corn so well that she could predict how each of her individual plants would differentially respond to a slight change in nighttime temperature. She had a profound feeling for her organism. . . . I'll never have that kind of feeling for what happens in quantum physics. Nor will Bob Jahn for psychoanalysis. But because we do each have a feeling for our own particular organism, we also have a feeling for what is as opposed to what it isn't. And that matters. New insight comes from knowing what something isn't at least as much as knowing what it is."  (pages 245, 252)
• Then there's the mention of physical phenomena that "Einstein once dubbed spukhafte Fernwirkungen, "spooky action at a distance," now described as entanglement, which "may end up playing a large role in how quantum physicists reconcile the roles of relativity and quantum theory in their search for a 'grand unified theory of everything.'" (page 257)
• (about successful work with in psychoanalysis): "You're perpetually reminded that trying hard doesn't get you there, and that you both [therapist and client] get there best when you somehow manage a state of trying and not trying, knowing and not knowing, certainty and uncertainty all at once. Every time you think you've hit on a less paradoxical formula, you're humbled again." (page 259)
• "Nearly one hundred years ago, William James published an essay called 'The Confidences of a "Psychical Researcher."' . . . It . . . raises many questions that still lack definitive answers. . . . [including this one:] 'But when was not the science of the future stirred to its conquering activities by the little rebellious exceptions to the science of the present?'" (oops, I've turned the book back in and forgot to grab the page number, but it's between its above-and-below neighbors here)
  
• "As I returned again and again to my notes on connectedness, one of Freud's most famous pronouncements took on a new resonance for me. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he described a correspondence between himself and Romain Rolland, the French novelist and pacifist who'd won the Nobel Prize for literature. Rolland had taken issue with Freud's attribution of all mystical and religious feeling to infantile illusion. Rolland held no brief for institutionalized religion or even for religious faith, but he believed that there existed a subjective human state that Freud's analysis of religion dismissed too quickly. Freud's respect for Rolland was great, but he simply could not recognize the experience Rolland described as basic to human existence. . . . It's fascinating. Freud was ready to permit the boundaryless quality of love, but he extended it only to sexual love. Only in that state, he said, do we see a nonpathological version of unboundaried human experience. That might have been one of Freud's most decisive articulations. It was certainly decisive for the future development of psychoanalytic theory. It led, among other things, to the irrevocable divergence of Jungian and Freudian thought." (pages 267-268)

Where the musk oxen went last Wednesday night

Late last year, some dear friends gave me a pair of earrings.

They'd watched Arctic Lace come together from first idea to finished, now award-winning, book. (That's Arctic Lace: Knitting Projects and Stories Inspired by Alaska's Native Knitters by Donna Druchunas. I edited the book, designed its interior layout, did the technical production, and published it.)

So when my friends went to Alaska to visit family, they found these earrings in Anchorage at the Alaska Native Medical Center Craft Shop. That shop is described here as: "A hidden jewel. See the emphasis on the holistic nature of the Alaska Native culture and the value of art in healing." I haven't been to the shop, but I look forward to having the opportunity some day. I especially like that "art in healing" comment.

The earrings were made and signed by R. B. Kokuluk (tiny signature on the back of each earring). I've searched on the name and found other carvings, but none is at a link that I think will be stable.

Obviously, I'm likely to keep these little treasures safely tucked away and to wear them for special occasions. Not only are they wonderful as a pair, they're extremely fine individuals (who would like to stay together, so I plan to keep them that way). As the photo shows, they match in color and shape without being identical (yes, the left one came with different-colored guard hair on its shoulder).

A qualifying special event occurred last Wednesday. My daughter and I met Donna and her husband Dom in Denver for the awards celebration for the Colorado Book Awards, sponsored by Colorado Humanities (the state humanities council).

There are only eight categories in the whole Colorado Book Awards process: anthology/collection, children's literature, creative nonfiction, fiction, history/biography, nonfiction, pictorial, and young adult literature. Competition is stiff. Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Knitting in the Old Way was a finalist the year it was published.

Arctic Lace had been selected as a finalist in the broad category of "nonfiction," along with The Apron Book by EllynAnne Geisel (published by Andrews McMeel), Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin by Pamela Walker Laird (published by Harvard University Press), and Walking into Colorado's Past: 50 Front Range History Hikes by Ben Fogelbert and Steve Grimstead (Westcliffe Publishers).

We were in extraordinary company with all the finalists in all the categories. While browsing the bookselling table, I made a lot of notes about titles I'll want to look up. Some ended up winning in their categories; even more didn't. Because the suspense of wondering who won isn't the point of this post, I'll let you know now that the overall winner in the nonfiction cluster was Walking into Colorado's Past.

Which doesn't dilute my feeling that we won just as thoroughly by making it into the small group of finalists. At that point, the winner's slot is luck of the draw.

So back to the question of what to wear. The usual jeans-and-t-shirt working clothes probably wouldn't cut it at an event announced as appropriate for "cocktail attire." I don't have cocktail attire, and would rather spend money on type.

I do have a qiviut gaiter (left below), which would have been mighty appropriate, but it's WAAAAY too warm for indoor wear.

I also have a lovely black Russian shawl that was perfect. It came from One People: One World in Anchorage, a gift from Donna Druchunas, author of Arctic Lace, and a reminder of our trip to Alaska last October for the book's launch at the Alaska State Yarn Council's Yarn Expo.

I was undoubtedly warmer than the MC, Natalie Tysdal, anchor of News 2 This Morning, who does own a cocktail dress. (The room was a comfortable temperature; I just enjoy being cosy as in "wrapped in a light layer of exquisitely spun and knitted natural fiber." That to me is warmth, and the reference only partially pertains to temperature.)

She looked really nice, though.

I also like my job lots better than I'd like hers. I may work twelve- to sixteen-hour days most days, but my alarm clock doesn't go off at 2:45 a.m. and I don't have to do my hair and makeup before appearing at my desk.

It's fun, however, to get dressed up for a special occasion like the book awards.

Here's Donna in her fancy duds (on the left) and my daughter in hers (on the right: she requested time off from one of her jobs to attend the party). You can't see my daughter's shoes in this photo. Mostly she wears reasonable shoes so she's only slightly taller than I am. This evening she wore fancy shoes that give her a good two or three inches (5 to 7.5 cm) over me.

About that basket my daughter is holding.

One feature of the awards celebration is a silent auction. The proceeds benefit Colorado Center for the Book programs for children's literacy, including Motheread/Fatheread Colorado, Authors in the Classroom, and the Student Literary Awards. My daughter and I bid on three baskets. We bid early, planning to support the process and to be outbid.

On a lark, we put in one later bid on the basket she's holding above: it contains all three books in a series by Hilari Bell, whose The Farsala Trilogy: Forging the Sword was a finalist in the young adult literature category. The basket also has several other neat things, including a weirdly wonderful plastic clock and a note from Hilari Bell (there's a real nice paragraph that she wrote on that link, similar in tone to the note in the basket). My daughter's been wanting to read this series ever since she saw the first volume when it was released under a different title (Flame).

We won it. I've never won a silent auction item.

Top place in the young adult category this year went to Laura Resau's What the Moon Saw (we bid on her silent auction basket but didn't win it).

Like I said, all the finalists in this event, not just the winners, were outstanding. The publishers run the gamut from the tiniest local presses to the biggest New York conglomerates.

Here's another winner by Shari Caudron, a fellow member of the Colorado Authors' League (I'm a member; so's Laura Resau), that I've been wanting to read since before it was published (Shari's was our third silent auction basket, another one that we didn't win). And another finalist I'd like to read.

Independent literary publisher Ghost Road Press had no less than four finalists, in anthology/collection, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, and took the top honors for anthology/collection (hey! Sonya Unrein got to pick up the prize! an editor won a prize!) and for fiction.

Dominic Cotignola, Donna's husband, took many of the photographs for Arctic Lace. Behind the camera is a great guy:

And here's a photo that proves I was there, too (Dom took this one; I took the others):

Alas, you can't see my sweater, which is a deep-sea-blue cotton version of Ann McCauley's "Peri's Parasol," from her The Pleasures of Knitting. I'll have to get another picture some time to show that.

We had a whole bunch of the Arctic Lace collaborators at the event (I'm not calling us a "team," because I think we're all too independent-minded for that, although we work well together):

• Donna: Researched and wrote the book.
• Dom: Took most of the photographs.
• My daughter: Processed the images so they'd look good when they were printed, and consulted with me on most of the other design decisions.
• Me: I edited the text, designed the interior, did production, marketed, and the like.

I think it was really nice of Colorado Humanities to have a party in honor of how we spent a few years of our lives.

We stayed out late for all of us, then headed home so we could get back to our jobs on Thursday morning.

I've tucked the earrings back safely away so they'll be ready for their next special outing.

And Arctic Lace has now earned three remarkable honors:

• Silver award, ForeWord Book of the Year Awards (Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Spinning in the Old Way won the bronze)
• Bronze award, Independent Publisher (IPPY) Awards
• Finalist, Colorado Book Awards (PDF of finalists)

First five photos © Deborah Robson. Sixth (final) photo © Dominic Cotignola.

UPDATE: Donna, who is much more technologically astute than I am, has a very cool slide show with more of Dom's photos on her blog.

Abby Franquemont on "should everyone spin?"

If you haven't seen and read Abby Franquemont's recent post on whether everyone should spin, and why, you may want to check it out. Make sure you have a few minutes for reading and thinking before you click that link, then go have fun.

Yep. That's it.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: Featured in Interweave Knits / Holiday Gifts 2007

This is fun! The Holiday Gifts 2007 issue of Interweave Knits features sweaters designed using the templates for Projects 8 and 9 from Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes, by Donna Druchunas, in both adult and kid sizes. (Project 8 is the Norwegian boatneck pullover and Project 9 is the Norwegian crewneck pullover.)

Aren't they beautiful?

The yarn is DK-weight GGH Wollywasch (100% superwash wool) worked at a sportweight-typical 6 stitches/inch (24 stitches/10cm) for extra warmth.

There's more on the sweaters here, along with a link to download a PDF written by Donna Druchunas (who wrote Ethnic Knitting Discovery) and Debbie O'Neill (who knitted the two sweaters on the book's cover) about designing your own Norwegian-style sweaters. (Access to the PDF requires either sign-up or log-in for a free Knitting Daily newsletter account.)

This publication isn't part of a regular subscription to Interweave Knits and you'll need to look for it specially in a yarn shop or on a newsstand.

The blog tour for Ethnic Knitting Discovery continues. There's a great diversity of hosting blogs and post topics. I'm enjoying seeing what pops up each day.

Blog Action Day coda

The final count of participating blogs in Blog Action Day 2007 on the environment (October 15) was 20,603. The main page for the endeavor now lists other statistics and has links to a handful of the posts. One of the sponsors of the event was the United Nations Environmental Programme.

It'll be back next year.

I had fun, and I look forward to doing it again.

___

The blog tour for Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting Discovery continues! I'm enjoying the variety of posts.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The "model shots"

This is the fifth (and final) post in a series about the development of the visual elements of Donna Druchunas' new book: Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes. Today's topic is what we call in shorthand the "model shots" or project drawings, which were drawn by Joyce M. Turley of Dixon Cove Design.

All the illustration work that came before the "model shots" prepared the foundation from which we could create them. This included the charts and swatches; schematics and flat drawings; techniques; and even the cover development.

In this post I'm going to talk about how we produced these twelve critical illustrations, one for each project, by using one of them as an example.

Yesterday, I gave two answers to a question that comes up from time to time: "Why doesn't this book have color photographs of the projects?" If you're wondering that, you may want to see this explanation. There are two important reasons, one that relates to the purpose of the book and one that relates to environmental concerns.

So we opted for black-and-white illustrations.

The style and accuracy of the images was perhaps even more important than it would have been if we'd been using photographs. In addition, for Ethnic Knitting Discovery, the "model drawings" would set the emotional tone for the whole book. That's a tall order.

Fortunately, a few months earlier I happened to meet Joyce at the annual conference of the Publishers Association of the West. I'd already established that she knows how to knit and crochet, and she does illustration work in a number of styles.

She's local, so I contacted her and asked to see her portfolio. We met at a coffee shop, and as it became apparent to me that she might be able to do the work in a way that would meet our needs, and that her schedule could accommodate the book's requirements, we began to talk at some length about the appropriate style for Ethnic Knitting Discovery. Some of the styles she uses would be appropriate for this book and some wouldn't.

By the end of that meeting, we'd decided to take the leap and work together on the project.

I gave Joyce a handful of nebulous words to guide her thoughts: playful, fun, approachable, cheerful, appealing, energetic.

Working by e-mail, we hammered out a contract, going back and forth through three or four drafts as we defined the work to be done, set up the time frame, figured out how much Nomad would pay for Joyce's work, and clarified what rights Nomad would have and which she would retain.

A good contract sets the foundation for a complex piece of work: it provides a framework for discussing all the aspects of scope, schedules, and financial expectations. Because Joyce and I had only met once, and briefly, the contract also let us start getting to know each other's working styles.

For the small projects and two of the sweaters—half the models—we had actual knitted objects to use as references for Joyce's drawings. Kris Paige had kindly knitted examples for all the small projects. She checked out a preliminary form of the instructions as she did so; we incorporated a number of her suggestions in the final versions. Debbie O'Neill knitted two sweaters that we also showed, in photographs, on the cover.

For all the model drawings we depended heavily on the background information I put together for the schematics and flat drawings.

I assembled a packet for each drawing. I sent part of it to Joyce electronically (photos and composite sweater worksheets). Part of it she had physically available (swatches and small projects).

For Project 12, one of the Andean designs, the packet consisted of photographs of Debbie's sweater:

Plus the knitted swatches and the materials I had been generating for the schematics and flat drawings:

The small bag in the photo above was a test project (I knitted that one) that helped me show Joyce how the puntas (a technique that's taught in the book) work at the edges of a knitted piece.

You'll notice significant differences between Debbie's sweater and the design in the drawing. Debbie's sleeves are striped, and she has incorporated some patterns that are in the book but weren't used in the design shown in the flat drawing. Debbie's sweater has a boatneck and the one in the drawing has a crewneck edged with puntas. Debbie's sweater is sized for a toddler and the drawing shows a sweater for an 8-year-old. The two sweaters are also at different gauges.

The point of the book is not to help readers replicate a specific design but to develop their own designs, using the elements described or ideas they've gathered from other sources.

We did want to make sure that the sweaters in the drawings, including those on the models, could actually be knitted as they were shown and that their proportions were correct in relation to the people's bodies . . . although, of course, readers can choose different amounts of ease, lengths, and other aspects of the sweaters they knit from these templates.

Joyce did sketches, working by hand with a pen, and set up a private web page for me to take a look. I gave her feedback and she made modifications. We made major revisions to only one drawing, although we tweaked details on all of them.

I knew we would be okay when we were talking about the types of people who would be wearing the garments and Joyce wrote in an e-mail, "I only draw people I would like to have as friends!"

That was great for me, because I spent a lot of time in these folks' company as I designed and laid out the book (actually, Joyce had preliminary layouts to show her how big the drawings would be and what other material they'd be juxtaposed with). It turns out I would like to have them all as friends, too.

For the final drawings, Joyce used a combination of hand drawing and electronic adjustment in Illustrator. In particular, she used the computer to put textures in the dark areas of the colorwork sweaters—a technique that worked beautifully.

Here's what she came up with from the materials in the photographs above:

That certainly looks playful, fun, approachable, cheerful, appealing, and energetic to me. I also know it's an accurate representation of one possibility for the project.

To see more of what Joyce came up with for Ethnic Knitting Discovery, check out this page (which is a lot like the preview pages she sent me links for) and the book itself.

I've enjoyed writing this group of posts. Now it's time to go work on a book!

___

The full series of posts on developing illustrations for Ethnic Knitting Discovery

Here are links to the full series of posts on developing the illustrations for Ethnic Knitting Discovery:

1. Cover development
2. Swatches and charts
3. Schematics and flat drawings
4. Technical drawings
5. "Model shots" or project drawings

Supplementary post on why Nomad Press books use black-and-white illustrations instead of color photographs.

Blog Action Day, part 2 of 2: On alternative transportation where we live

This is the second installment in my contribution to Blog Action Day postings on the topic of the environment. The first installment involved a few of the decisions about how the books get published at Nomad Press, a micro-publishing house that operates out of my basement (commute: 0 miles).

Breakdown Sunday

Yesterday's events show some of the difficulties of reducing a personal environmental footprint where we live. On Sundays when the weather is good or even not-too-bad, we bike to the grocery store. We love our bikes and the ride along the bike trail. However, it was raining and cold and I've been diligently working not to come down with a fall bug after a bunch of travel, so we took the car. Our dogs rode along because they like to go places.

When we finished shopping, the car wouldn't start. That wasn't a major problem: we called AAA, which said they'd get a service truck to us within 60 minutes. They'd either start it or tow it. I had a feeling we'd need a tow. Although the car's rolled along for more than 176,000 miles, the battery is pretty new and when I turned the ignition key it didn't feel like a battery problem.

Home, at this point, was approximately 2.5 miles away.

The dispatcher said the dogs couldn't ride in the cab of the tow truck, but that they could stay in the car while it was towed. One dog is thirteen years old. The other is on her third home (that we know about) and has some anxiety problems. They'd probably both be fine in the towed car, especially since 4WD requires flatbed towing, but if we could get them home a different way it would be kinder. Our groceries also included a bunch of frozen vegetables, slowly thawing.

If one of us could get home and retrieve the other car, we could get ourselves, the dogs, and the groceries where they needed to be, assuming the primary car would be headed for the garage and wouldn't be available again for at least a day. (Of course, we thought first of calling dog-friendly buddies for a lift. One set: out of town. Another set: out of state. Yet another: serious family problems right now and they don't need extra stress. Next choice: lives too far away.) We don't run the second car often—although it has fewer miles than the primary car, it's not quite as solid any more; we don't take it more than a few miles from home, so it clocks maybe 25 miles in a big week—but it's incredibly useful to have. It makes sure we both get enough uninterrupted work done to pay the bills.

We began to come up with alternatives for getting home:

• I used to stow rollerblades and knee- and elbow-pads in the cars we drove before this one because they broke down a lot. We've had this car for eleven years and it hasn't faced us with many emergencies. The rollerblades were at home in the closet. Bummer.
• While this city of 125,000 has an extensive bus system, the schedules and routes have some serious drawbacks. One is that no buses run on Sundays. (Evenings are also not well served; on days with service, all routes stop by 7:26 p.m. and only the number 1 bus runs that late.)
• We called the city's one taxi service. Estimated wait for a ride on Sunday afternoon at about 2 p.m. was 60 to 90 minutes.

It was still raining.

More alternatives:

• A bike shop was just under a block away. I thought maybe they'd rent us a used bike for a couple of hours. We've both wanted to try out a recumbent bike anyway. I walked over. Closed Sundays.
• A block in the other direction is the car rental place that gives shop rates for people having repairs done at our regular garage. I walked over. Closed Sundays.

By then the rain had turned from drizzle to mist and I decided to walk home while my daughter stayed with the car. It took me 26 minutes, which is pretty fast for foot travel.

One reason I could make such good time was the bike path, which also made it a pleasant walk.

Aside: Here's a fun site that evaluates walkability of neighborhoods. However, its scores should be adjusted with some reality checks. Our location produced a decent score of 71, partly calculated on the proximity of services it says are .3 mile away . . . with the intervening railroad tracks, you really have to walk or bike about 1.5 not-too-pleasant miles to get to these spots. It tagged a religious school as being close (although it turns out this is a mailing address and the physical location is elsewhere) and completely missed the public schools. And while it included the Starbucks that's a pain to get to—across the nasty intersection of two major routes—it didn't include our wonderful neighborhood coffee shop. The library's calculated just right, though. We frequently walk or bike to the library. The Walkscores are a terrific idea and I'd sure like to see more done with them!

It then took me about 20 minutes to drive back to the grocery with the backup car (a year older and not quite as reliable, but only 172,000 miles on it). Time/distance measurement by car: 2.7 miles; 9 minutes (with no delay for a freight train).

I arrived just as the tow truck was pulling away with the primary car. I picked up daughter, dogs, and groceries, and we went to the garage to put a key through the night drop slot with instructions for the garage crew on Monday morning.

Here's the efficient and friendly truck driver and the fine tow truck leaving the car at the place that will fix it for us:

So that's what I did instead of finishing the blog post I intended to publish yesterday, which will be appearing soon. Maybe tomorrow. No commitments. It is almost ready.

I should note that I would be happy if my car never wore out. Although it's an SUV, it gets 27 miles/gallon (its secrets: a standard transmission, routine maintenance, and a light foot on both accelerator and brake). It provides convenient and dry transport for dogs (and dog crates), looms and/or spinning wheels, lumber, and, of course, between sixteen and twenty cartons of books at a time (plus the hand truck), depending on how I load them. It will be hard to replace, especially for the current monthly payments ($0). Over the past few years, I have started to baby it by renting new sedans for road trips. They get the same mileage and aren't as pleasant to drive or versatile to use.

I would like to try out a hybrid RAV4, if there were such a thing, to see if it would handle my cargo needs. There isn't one yet.

And, of course, I walk and ride my bike as much as possible.

Interesting maps and data

While I was in Seattle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed the third of five parts of a curriculum called "Envisioning Ecotopia," developed for the Newspapers in Education Program by the P-I Public Affairs Department (Tuesday, October 9, 2007, page E5).

It included a map prepared by the Sightline Institute comparing states' emission rates of global-warming gases to those of whole countries outside the U.S. The map shows that Washington state emits as many global-warming gases as Iraq, and Colorado emits as many as Cuba and Colombia combined. Here's the map, and you can visit Sightline for additional information on how the statistics behind the map were developed:

Here's the Canadian equivalent:

There's more fun data about U.S. energy use here. Even though the information isn't cheerful, I think it's fun because it helps me understand. And once I understand, I can begin to take tiny steps in a new direction.

What I'd really like right now is a way to recycle more solid waste right here at home. We can (and do) recycle cardboard, pasteboard, newspaper, cans, and narrow-necked bottles. Those are all picked up curbside. If we drive to the recycling center, we can also recycle office paper. We have two big trash cans in which we collect office paper (no labels, no windows, used both sides) so we don't have to drive there too often. We cannot currently recycle yard waste (we don't have room to compost rose canes), other plastics (like yogurt containers), or expanded polystyrene foam (except by bundling it up and shipping it from Colorado to Maryland, a mere 1,714 miles). I've got a pile of that foam here that I can't bring myself to send to the landfill. It's clean. It's re-usable. It's not good for packing books. It's in the way.

And now I need to get back to work. We all know it isn't easy being green . . . but it's an interesting challenge, and one supremely worthy of our continued creative effort.

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New starter required. Also burned out solenoid = reason for toasted starter. Some fried wiring. Oops. The whole darn wire harness is melted. As the guy from the garage just said, "You'd think things could be easy sometimes, but they're not." I'm currently grateful for AAA and that this happened near home and our regular service crew.

Good thing today (and I hope tomorrow) involves bike-friendly weather and responsibilities.

Blog Action Day, part 1 of 2: On not printing color pictures in our books

Yesterday I intended to put up the final post in a series of five about the development of the illustrations for Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes, by Donna Druchunas. Then we had a bit of car trouble that wrenched that plan in a new direction.

Today is Blog Action Day: "What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? One issue. One day. Thousands of voices."

When I heard about the idea of Blog Action Day, I was curious. The topic is one I think about pretty constantly—the environment. On August 18, I signed up to participate. As I am composing this, 15,355 blogs are involved.

So today I'm honoring this previous commitment, although this first of two posts on the environment will contain some discussion of Ethnic Knitting Discovery. I'll get the final installment in the illustration series up tomorrow. It's almost ready. If the car hadn't had a problem, it would have been up on time.

Advice for Blog Action participants looks like this: "What works best is to keep writing as you normally would. Your audience reads your blog for a reason, you don't need to suddenly change your voice, style or emphasis. Simply find an angle on your regular postings which relates to the environment."

Keeping that in mind, I have two primary topics for today's pair of posts. This installment pertains to my business, a micro-publishing operation called Nomad Press, and the second installment relates to the challenges of getting around without owning a car where I live. I don't get along without a car. I know a few people who do, but they have unusual personal circumstances and it still isn't easy for them. Yesterday's relatively minor inconveniences once again bumped me up against how hard it can be.

So here's an environmental question about the books we publish:

Why aren't there any color project photographs in Nomad Press's knitting books?

I get asked this question fairly often. And although Nomad's books do win a lot of awards, our publications are often edged out by books that do contain color. Book-buyers today have come to expect (even to take for granted) large quantities of color imagery. So far, none of the Nomad Press titles has contained color photographs or drawings in its interior (covers are another matter), although our most recent release has been printed with two colors of ink (black and an accent color).

Nomad Press's books to date include:

• Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes, by Donna Druchunas (2007, softcover)
• Spinning in the Old Way, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts (2006, softcover; ForeWord Book of the Year Bronze Award)
• Arctic Lace: Knitting Projects and Stories Inspired by Alaska's Native Knitters, by Donna Druchunas 2006, softcover; ForeWord Book of the Year Silver Award, Independent Publisher Bronze Award, and finalist for Colorado Book Award)
• Knitting in the Old Way: Designs and Techniques from Ethnic Sweaters, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts and Deborah Robson (2005, softcover; 2004, hardcover; Independent Publisher Book Award finalist; ForeWord Book of the Year Award finalist; Colorado Book Award finalist)
• Riddle in the Mountain, by Daryl Burkhard (Dogtooth Books, an imprint of Nomad Press) (2005, hardcover; Independent Publisher Book Award winner)
• Simple Socks, Plain and Fancy, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts (2004, softcover; 2001, hardcover)
• High Whorling, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts (1998, hardcover; out of print and replaced by the completely re-envisioned version of the information in Spinning in the Old Way)

We are considering the judicious use of color in some future titles where the material can't be adequately represented in black and white, although we need to resolve both environmental and cost questions before we take that step.

Right now we don't use color because we want to stay in control, as much as possible, of our books' environmental impact and because we can't afford to print color interiors while doing that.

The good news is that black-and-white illustrations have so far also supported the primary purpose of our books, which is to help readers develop new skills and increase confidence in their own design skills.

We haven't used color illustrations because we don't think they are necessary and may even work against our books' purposes (see also the next section)

I'll use our newest book, Ethnic Knitting Discovery by Donna Druchunas, as an example.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery is intended to help readers leave patterns behind and knit sweaters that they design themselves. "Design" here means something easy and rewarding, not a complex process. "Design" in this context requires only the skills that even beginning-level knitters already possess.

Before literacy became prevalent and, somewhat later, knitting patterns began to be published, all knitters worked without patterns. (For information on the history of written knitting patterns in the United States, Susan Strawn's new Knitting America is a wonderful resource.)

The ancestors of today's knitters were smart and creative. So are today's knitters, but many of us have forgotten how to work without training wheels. Part of what we lack is guidance. Part of what we lack is confidence. Part of what we lack is the willingness to try something and start over if it doesn't work (although we certainly don't avoid ripping when we work from patterns!). We're in such a hurry to be done . . . even if we're "process" knitters . . . that we miss the pleasure of discovering what our own visions can manifest.

At Nomad Press, we want to expand, not to limit, readers' visions of what they can achieve.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery presents a series of templates for small projects and sweaters. Photographs of specific projects would unavoidably narrow the readers' imaginative reach. If we showed a sweater on a teen-aged girl knitted at sportweight gauge in yellow, someone might flip past, thinking "I don't like yellow, I want to knit for my toddler who's a boy (or myself, nowhere near those proportions), and I'd really like to use chunky yarn."

We've made some compromises, of course. Even some of the drawings that we do use place some limitations around perception. For example, a sweater drawn on an adult man doesn't need to be a guy's sweater, although it may be assumed to be one because of the way it's shown.

Another sweater in Ethnic Knitting Discovery, even though it's called "For Girls Only" and is drawn on a young girl, could just as well be modified for an adult woman (I'd like a variant of this one!) or a young boy, although he'd probably want different colors and different trim, as the book suggests. Even an adult man with a sense of whimsy could enjoy a version of this project.

So we've compromised simply by showing sweaters on people. We do want readers to get the sense that the garments can be made for real human beings . . . one advantage of photos, although with photo styling it's not always easy to tell how a garment really looks even if it's photographed on a model. (I've enjoyed Knitting Daily's recent "how does it look on real people?"posts.) At the same time, we want to leave ideas of color, gauge, and specific design for the individual reader to develop with the book's guidance.

We certainly understand the desire to see solid, real-world garments made from these plans. There are a few photographs on the cover. In addition, author Donna Druchunas is setting up a web gallery that will let readers share what they're making from the ideas in the book. It will be at www.ethnicknitting.com in the near future. For now, that domain name links to a subpage of Donna's site, but it will be expanding. (From what we hear, Ravelry may also be a place to find ideas and inspiration that relate to Ethnic Knitting Discovery as people begin working with the book; both Donna and I are still on the waiting list.)

We haven't used color illustrations because of environmental concerns

We love color photos. We love heavily illustrated books. Yet Nomad Press also has strong commitments (1) to environmental awareness . . . and environmental action . . . and (2) to pricing our books so they are accessible to as many knitters as possible.

The most economical color book printing is currently being done in Asia, not North America. You can get high quality printing of full-color books done on this continent, but the cost doesn't fit many publishers' profit-and-loss projections . . . including ours. We have more ideas for books and in order to publish them we need to avoid red ink in the bookkeeping department more often than not.

Asian printers are not yet reliably offering papers that meet environmental benchmarks like those set by the Green Press Initiative. For example, there's an 11-page PDF here on Asian printing and the papers that are used and their environmental impact. In addition, a lot of resources, mostly fossil fuels, go into transporting books . . . which are heavy . . . across the globe. We transport books. We try not to transport them unnecessarily often or far.

Green Press Initiative offers many recommendations for environmentally responsible publishing. One is to "embrace the precautionary principle," which states that "it is better to do something you are sure is not causing harm than to do something you are unsure of. When applied to paper, it means that it is better to use paper that you are sure is not sourced from forests that support crucial ecosystems or indigenous communities."

We are doing that.

In sum, there are no color photographs of the projects inside this Nomad Press book because. . . .

By using black-and-white illustrations instead of color photographs, we are encouraging readers to exercise their creative muscles (the point of the book) at the same time that we are certain that the paper we are using is not causing specific, preventable harm.

The book was printed by a firm that certifies the sources of its paper and calculates the printing's environmental impact. We chose the printer for this reason. There is an eco-audit printed on the last page of Ethnic Knitting Discovery.

The first print run of this title, using 50% postconsumer recycled paper, processed chlorine-free, saved:

• 16 trees (40 feet tall and 6-8 inches in diameter)
• 6,830 gallons of wastewater
• 2,747 kilowatt hours of electricity
• 753 pounds of solid waste
• 1,479 pounds of greenhouse gases

The greater the percentage of recycled paper, the greater the environmental savings. We are using papers with 30%, 50%, and sometimes 100% postconsumer recycled content (PCW). If we could afford 100% all the time, we would use it. We can't. It is still more expensive than "regular" paper.

Last year, the first two printings of Arctic Lace, on 30% PCW paper, processed chlorine-free, saved:

• 24 trees (40 feet tall and 6-8 inches in diameter)
• 9,959 gallons of wastewater
• 14.2 million BTUs of energy
• 1,469 pounds of solid waste
• 2,815 pounds of net greenhouse gases

The savings categories are slightly different because the information comes from a different printer. The savings amounts per copy vary depending on paper choice, trim size, and page count. But overall, our printing choices are making a difference.

We're very small. Yet with several print runs of our titles each year, little Nomad Press probably saves a nice-sized grove of trees annually, while keeping some water clean and making the air a bit easier to breathe for a few people and critters and plants.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: Background for the technical drawings

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the development of the visual elements of Donna Druchunas' new book: Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes. Today's topic is the technical illustrations.

My explanation feels to me a little klutzy. Although all of the illustrations in Ethnic Knitting Discovery required painstaking attention to detail, the technical illustrations demand almost superhuman concentration from everyone involved in creating them. I feel like it takes too many words to explain what we did!

The copyright page of the 2002 (updated) edition of Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book credits more than fifty people who contributed to that book's writing, editing, illustration, and photography (8 editors, 1 art director/designer, 1 project director, 2 illustrators although one of them is "and associates," 2 design assistants, 5 contributing writers, 3 photographers, 3 people doing charts and schematics, 2 consultants, and 35 contributors, including people like . . . to pick a random handful . . . Norah Gaughan, Annie Modesitt, Deborah Newton, and Dorothy Radigan; major shifts from the 1989 edition involved an extra design assistant and a change in responsibility for the fashion photography).

It's easy to understand how the work involved that many folks!

Because of the complicated and then condensed schedule for Ethnic Knitting Discovery, both Donna and I generated reference materials for the technical illustrations and two illustrators, Joyce M. Turley and Gayle Ford, produced the final images. Gayle works exclusively by hand, and her drawings have a characteristic delicacy and astonishing level of detail. She has provided illustrations for a number of Interweave Press publications for many years and got Ethnic Knitting Discovery off to a good start. When changes in the production schedule left us needing to generate additional illustrations quickly, Joyce—whom I'd met almost by chance at last fall's conference for the Publishers Association of the West (PubWest)—pitched in. She uses a combination of hand-drawn and electronic processes, which made it simple for us to put color in a few of the demos where that contrasting component really comes in handy. She works in a variety of styles and the one we chose together for these illustrations gave us speed (which we needed) without sacrificing clarity.

It's incredibly helpful, almost essential, when an artist who is illustrating knitting (especially techniques) knows how to knit. Even when the person does have that ancillary (in this case) skill, the reference materials need to point out without a doubt what the drawing needs to show: where the emphasis needs to be, and what particular aspects of the technique the knitter needs to focus on in each drawing.

This post won't show the finished drawings, in part because anyone who reads knitting books or magazines is constantly exposed to completed work of this type . . . although mostly because the post would be even longer than it is. Instead I've got plenty of background images to share as I talk about what happens behind the scenes. You can't readily find that stuff elsewhere.

If you need to illustrate techniques, you can, of course, simply photograph the objects or the steps in a process and print those pictures. Sometimes that's the right way to go about conveying information.

However, I think that the two-step process we went through—making a swatch or samples and then working either directly from the yarn (or swatch) or from a photograph of it—served this book best, in terms of both ease of use and the book's overall aesthetic flavor. The book itself is a work that requires artistic integrity, although for a book of this type the reader's ability to learn easily from it trumps all other factors.

This series of posts separates the overall illustration project into several subsets. Similarly, the technical drawings themselves were subdivided into types. Some required us to show swatches at different stages; some showed body positioning in relation to the knitted work; still others showed the formation of individual stitches or sets of stitches. Although I'm not going to divide this post by these subtypes, you'll see some of each.

Swatches

In some cases, we needed to knit swatches to show techniques. The objects below represent less than half of what we had for each of the techniques they show.

On the left is a swatch showing a lower-edge finishing technique used on Danish sweaters. It's the final in a series of three; we ended up showing the middle image only. We used the same sample for all three, so the preliminary stages got absorbed in the final.

On the right are swatches showing the most basic approach to cutting armholes and necklines, explained (but not required) for the Norwegian sweaters in Ethnic Knitting Discovery. There were two other swatches for this, which had actually been cut, but those have vanished. (For the very curious, Gayle's final drawings are in the book on pages 71, which shows an in-process stage of the lefthand technique, and 27; the lefthand swatch was also invaluable in Joyce's drawings on pages 83 and especially 93.)

The next photograph shows two sides of one larger swatch, worked in the round to show actual steeking steps. The yellow shows how to pick up stitches along the cut edge of a steek. (Gayle's drawings are on page 28 in the book.)

Side note: I was also playing with a personal inquiry on this swatch, which is why the patterning in the lower part (below the bottom of the steek) is more white-dominant than that in the upper part. The difference occurred because I knit two-color patterns with one color in each hand, and I switched which color was in which hand.

All of those swatches were knitting in worsted-weight cotton yarn (Sugar 'n Cream and similar stuff), which makes the stitches easy to see while producing a swatch that isn't so big it's hard to handle.

Body language

Some illustrations need to show the knitter's body or fingers in relation to the forming textile.

Here's Donna's reference image showing the fundamental information on how to hold a piece of Andean knitting. This is a pretty small piece of knitting, so we enlarged how it looked in the final (the lower drawing on page 135, by Joyce).

On some images, I pulled the reference shot into Photoshop and added notes about exactly what the drawing needed to show. This was so the illustrator didn't have to figure out which written note belonged with which image. (This is the upper drawing on page 135, also by Joyce.)

Sometimes those notes got a little complicated and I used funky Photoshop skills to add arrows and to outline the paths of the yarn and/or individual stitches. This sometimes wasn't stuff that needed to be on the finished drawing (sometimes it was) but it needed to direct the illustrator's attention. (Final is the upper drawing on page 136, by Joyce.)

All three of the images above are Donna's hands and samples. Another set of techniques took both of us working swatches and snapping photos to produce clear enough references. So here are my hands, which look quite a bit less photogenic than Donna's. (Final is the upper drawing on page 105, by Joyce, but see editor's mea culpa below.)

By the way, the illustration developed from this image contains the only error we've found so far in the first printing of the book. It was my fault: I approved the final without noticing that the arrow goes behind both strands of (green) yarn, instead of just one, as in the reference (it's correct in the photo). This is my problem, not the illustrator's, because drawing requires enough intense concentration that the drawings definitely need to go back to the technical editor for final sign-off.

Ideally, I would take the drawings and use them, with needles in hand, to reproduce the actions shown and see if I got the appropriate results . . . essentially, pretending that I don't know the technique and only have the information in front of me to go by. We got these drawings together very much later in production than usual and I trusted my eyes. Bad idea. Where knitting is concerned, the fingers—holding yarn and needles—are much more reliable.

The yarn in that last example is Brown Sheep worsted-weight singles, which is one of my standby sampling yarns. You'll note that we were both using yarns that were neither too dark nor too light to show stitch definition clearly in photographs.

Odd yarns

Sometimes it's harder than usual to demo a particular technique. I've collected different sizes and colors of more rigid, but still knittable, cording for these situations:

The big stuff's easy to see, but makes huge swatches. The little stuff's pleasanter to work with, but may not have enough clarity. I really liked working with the yellow and white strands in the photo below (structure somewhat disintegrated because I didn't know I was going to want to take its photo after it had served its original purpose). (Finals by Joyce turned into the series on pages 138 and 139—a set of six step-by-step drawings.)

However, it was still too hard to see what was going on in this technique, so I reworked at a larger scale. The multicolored cording (left over from a successful knotting experiment) is visually way too busy, but I had it so I made do with it. The knitting needles are two different colors, again to help the illustrator differentiate all the elements in the scene. The green needle is just lying there because I'd just completed one step on the sample and hadn't started the next.

Core concerns relating to technical references and drawings

The best solution is whatever works to convey the information as clearly and quickly as possible—first to the illustrator, and then to the most important person in the equation, the reader.

I always like to make sure that the illustrations are reproduced large enough that a knitter can use them while the book is sitting open on a table or lap and the knitting is actually in hand. I also work with the layout to assemble both words and images relating to a technique on the same page or spread (a spread is a set of two facing pages), if that's humanly possible. If the reader has to turn a page while executing a technique, I do my best to put the split at a logical point.

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The full series of posts on developing illustrations for Ethnic Knitting Discovery

Here are links to the full series of posts on developing the illustrations for Ethnic Knitting Discovery:

1. Cover development
2. Swatches and charts
3. Schematics and flat drawings
4. Technical drawings
5. "Model shots" or project drawings

Supplementary post on why Nomad Press books use black-and-white illustrations instead of color photographs.