The Independent Stitch

Interlude: Knitting and reading

In between writing blog posts about the visual components of Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and the Andes; flying to and back from Seattle; shipping out packages and cartons of books; making up invoices; and wrestling the finances into order before and after a trip, I've been reading, thinking about reading, knitting, and thinking about knitting.

The Professor's House

While in Seattle, I read Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925) and went along with my mother to her book group meeting. I've never been part of a book group at home; not enough time.

(Asides: The novel is available online from Project Gutenberg, although I have difficulty enjoying narratives like this in frames rather than on pages. I am very curious about who did the painting on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln page that I linked to from Cather's name. The only credit I have found is to the Sheldon Art Gallery, but so far I am not managing to see the information on the Cather site or to locate it on the gallery's site. Henri? Willa Cather, 1873-1947; Robert Henri, 1865-1929; both had Nebraska connections, although cursory research suggests not concurrently. I'd welcome insight. . . .)

The Professor's House is structurally unusual, although the book itself is nowhere near as odd as Wikipedia's discussion of it, which I'm linking to as a curiosity and not a recommendation.

It's written in three parts: roughly 175 pages, 75 pages, 30 pages. The first and third parts are told in third person and concern the professor of the title, who is torn between his desire to do his own thinking-and-writing and his commitment to relationships with his family, colleagues, and students. This is in part echoed in the family's move to a newer, nicer house and the professor's stubborn refusal to vacate the old house, especially his uncomfortable and in some ways physically unsafe study. The center section, told in first person, recounts the history of one of the professor's most able students, almost a family member, who died young (no, the student didn't come back from the dead to speak; this section is introduced with a "this is what he told us, and how he said it" bridge from the first section).

One could write many papers on this novel; lots of folks already have. Today I suspect the manuscript would have a hard time getting published by a major house, even if its author had won a Pulitzer for another novel three years earlier (Cather won for One of Ours in 1922). It's superficially disjointed and many statements and situations are left unresolved. That's all on the surface, though.

At one of the possible reading levels, the general movement of the story explores how we make small decisions in our lives—the constant interplay of values in daily choices—and how those ultimately add up to the whole of an individual existence.

It's a quiet book that hits in the gut if read with attention and an open mind.

Other books

Because I took time for The Professor's House, I didn't read any of the other four books I'd taken with me . . . books I've been meaning to read for a while. Three of them were novels that have been on the "intend to read" list for a couple of months because they're too long or intricate for the twenty-minutes-before-bed routine.

The fourth is a nonfiction title, Why We Read What We Read: A Delightfully Opinionated Journey through Bestselling Books, by Lisa Adams and John Heath. It was released a couple of weeks ago by independent publisher Sourcebooks.

I'm reading a galley (advance uncorrected proof). The publisher changed the subtitle at the last minute. In a way, the old subtitle gave a better clue to the content. I haven't unpacked yet, but the old subtitle included thoughts about what bestseller lists reveal about "us," "us" in this case being the culture of the present-day United States. However, the first subtitle was, as is obvious, not easy to remember (I can't remember it) and the book is, indeed, delightfully opinionated. It does examine bestseller lists—and the authors read a massive number of the books on the lists they studied—and draws conclusions about the people who would read these works that have been bought in large quantities.

I'll have more to say when I finish it. It's actually a book to savor, rather than charge through, although an uninterrupted reader could happily take it at one go.

Armed with a 50%-off-one-purchase coupon from the local independent bookstore, I placed some special orders.

Thanks, Lola, for the tip about the book on the right: Fonts and Encodings by Yannis Haralambous. I won't read it all, but the parts I will read will resolve major questions for me. I've been taking Linux for Non-Geeks by Rickford Grant out of the library (and repeatedly renewing it until they won't let me renew any more) for over a year. It's a few years old but deals with the version of Linux I run on one of my computers and about which I want to become more knowledgeable. Yogini: The Power of Women in Yoga, by Janice Gates, is for fun.

The knitting

On the left is the start of a new pair of socks. Yarn acquired in Seattle because I needed some brain-free, rewarding knitting. I will know what yarn it is as soon as I unpack and find the label.

On the right is a lace swatch, done in worsted weight although the result I have in mind will be fingering weight. This isn't a gauge swatch, obviously! It's a getting-acquainted-with-the-pattern swatch. The first couple of rows are in yellow because they're set-up rows. Then I worked three repeats. The yarn is the Cascade 220 that was specified for the homework part of the Rovaniemi class I took in Seattle last weekend with Susanna Hansson.

Until tomorrow

I was not planning to work very much today. I think I'd better quit before the clock tells me it's 10 p.m.

Tomorrow: another post on the Ethnic Knitting Discovery illustrations.

In a few days I will go back to my previous posting frequency, no doubt. . . .

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: Drafting the schematics and flat project drawings

This is the third 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 schematic illustrations and the flat project drawings.

(There will be a delay before I can post the fourth and fifth installments in this series, because I'm on the road and I need to get back home and collect the images for the two final sections. I got the images for the first through third posts gathered and processed before I left on this trip and brought them along on a USB drive. . . .)

A lot of technical editing needed to take place before these drawings could be done so they were correct. We didn't want just decoration or wishful thinking. Even though Ethnic Knitting Discovery is based on the idea that the reader will make a custom project in an individual choice of patterns and yarns, guided by the plans and worksheets provided, it would be pretty silly to put in drawings of items, especially sweaters, that look nice but won't work on the needles.

The drawings show one possible interpretation of each design plan. However, it's a real interpretation.

We couldn't, of course, knit every possibility, either! Debbie O'Neill knitted a Norwegian-style pullover and an Andean sweater, following the plans with her own interpretations. These are shown on the cover and Debbie's stories of her design decisions are included in the book.

Kris Paige knitted at least one sample of the small skill-building projects that introduce each chapter—scarf, cap, headbands, and bag. I knitted two of the small Andean bags as well (mostly because I find them completely charming, they're quick to knit, and they're great fun). Kris made her Andean bag at a small gauge from handspun llama in natural colors! It's terrific. And she made three headbands.

And I did a heap of "knitting" in both software and on paper to check the worksheets and the process instructions at a range of "normal" gauges, from 3 to 6.5 stitches to the inch (12 to 26 stitches / 10 cm).

My demonstrations here will all be drawn from Project 3, The Netherlands, Sampler Pullover, pages 58 to 67. I completed these drawings myself.

Schematics

Schematics show the shape of the project or sweater in outline form. They're a fundamental knitting roadmap. The schematics in Ethnic Knitting Discovery are drawn to scale at a standard size that is explained in the book's introductory material.

Here's author Donna Druchunas' original reference sketch:

Donna maligns her drawings in public, and it's true that she's not a trained artist, but having some visual reference is golden and she gives me plenty to work with. I scanned in her rough drawings of all sorts (there's another of her drawings later in this post) and used them for preliminary layout. That helped the project move along at a nice pace before we had "real" illustrations.

The sketch above became page 62 in the finished book. I'm writing this away from home and didn't bring the PDFs of the book with me or I'd show you the comparison. There will be plenty of images in this post, though, so it's probably just as well that I can't.

Here's the schematic portion of that sketch, all by itself:

I needed to make sure that what we printed for this was (1) correct, (2) in proportion, and (3) clear.

First I went to the associated project worksheets and, using Carole Wulster's Sweater Wizard software, I drafted a sweater pattern to fit the exact sample measurements we were using. I exported the resulting pattern pieces and combined them in a Photoshop file. To do this, I needed to tech edit the worksheets (the first tech editing: the worksheets got three or four tech edits before they were done).

(I also used Carole's Print-A-Grid software to print to-scale stitch grids on which I charted out a number of sweaters in alternative sizes and gauges. Print-A-Grid has been a standard piece of software on my computer for at least three or four operating systems. I know I had it on early Windows; I'm not sure it was around for DOS; I'm pretty sure it doesn't go back as far as CP/M! But if memory serves me well, I think I have run it so far under Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 93SE, and XP.)

Working in Photoshop, I removed the measurement indicators, rotated the sleeve, and set up the two sections to be combined.

On this sweater, the sleeves are picked up and worked down from the shoulder, so I needed to move the sleeve to the left and join it to the body for the schematic. For sleeves worked from cuff to shoulder, I would have left space as in the preliminary set-up above.

Here's the finished computer reference version of the schematic. The ribbing indicators were a hand-drawn texture, scanned in and electronically duplicated to fit the lower edge and the cuffs. We ended up not using that texture on the final schematics. We did use a variant (hand-drawn) on the flat drawings.

Then I got out my pens to produce the final. I made these drawings last spring. I have since learned how to do this work in Illustrator, but I think I would still choose to use hand-drawn ink in a number of situations because I like the less mechanical feel. I may just be old-fashioned.

The paper shows different line weights produced by the variety of drawing pens. I used that scrap as a reference while I worked.

Fortunately, this is work that can be done with music in the background. Editing can't be. So drawing offers a nice change of pace, although I need to be very deliberate about it. I can't work on drawings when I get tired, and each drawing needs to be inked to a certain level and then the ink needs to dry before I can do the next section. While I worked on later sections, I used scrap paper to cover already-inked areas so the moisture from my hands wouldn't smear the parts that were done while I was working on the next sections.

Here's the completed schematic for the Netherlands Sampler Pullover sweater:

One advantage of working with scans of hand-drawn images is that we can clean up slight slips of the pen and other irregularities after we've turned them into electronic files. Someone who wants precision, or more than accuracy, would definitely be working in Illustrator on this job. I figure knitting is flexible, and the slight variations in the drawings are compatible with that quality.

Flat project drawings

The flat project drawings are intended to show the knitting as it would look with all its finishing touches in place: a possible arrangement of patterns, neckline finish, and other details.

As I mentioned earlier, the projects in Ethnic Knitting Discovery can be knitted in many gauges and sizes. This sample sweater was planned for a 40-inch (102 cm) body circumference and a gauge of 4 stitches and 6 rows to the inch (16 stitches and 24 rows / 10 cm).

Here's Donna's original sketch:

Donna knew, and successfully showed, what she wanted a sweater to look like. She wasn't thinking of a specific gauge or size—although she has enough experience to have darn good instincts about what will fit. Check out the numbers of repeats for a couple of the patterns, comparing her quick sketch with the final drawings, if you'd like confirmation of that.

Basing my stitch and row counts on the calculations generated by Sweater Wizard while I was constructing the schematic, I turned to Knit Visualizer and began putting together a very specific design—one that could be knitted. Each of Donna's chapters has a selection of diverse and compatible stitch patterns and I had swatches and charts to refer to (described in yesterday's post).

Here's Knit Visualizer's version of a possible sweater at the sample size and gauge. Note that the stitches are square, so the results are elongated. The row and stitch counts do work with the calculations.

Here's where things got both tricky and fun.

I exported the Knit Vizualiser patterns into Photoshop and resized them (1) to stitch/row proportions to match the gauge swatch and then (2) to the same dimensions as the schematic. The second resizing served as a crosscheck that I'd gotten the math right in all the previous steps. If I had, I could put the patterning in a layer over the schematic (combining the shape and the pattern in one Photoshop file) and they'd fit together just about perfectly.

This almost always worked the first time!

Here's resizing 1, to correct stitch/row proportions:

Here's the schematic and the patterning combined:

I noted that there was no neckline finish yet. The opening of the neckline is to scale, but there's no ribbing yet. I did that manually when I completed the drawing with my pens.

Here are some of the worksheets for the pattern on this sweater, the reference drawing above, and the finished ink drawing. I worked over the reference drawing, using permanent ink and artist's vellum, which is a very smooth, translucent paper.

You can see by comparing the electronic version, above, with the finished version, below, that I didn't trace. The point was to produce a drawing that reflected the impression the stitches would make when knitted, not to reproduce a graph. I kept the swatches nearby as I worked on each pattern stitch area, and used the charted version to guide my placement of the patterns and their repeats. The drawings needed to be simple in order to represent the finished effect.

The schematics and the drawings were produced at about 130% of the intended finished reproduction size. This helps make it easier to reproduce images; working larger-than-final has been a standard illustration practice since the old days of photostats (cameras that were used to make reproducible art that consisted only of solid black or solid white areas). It works at least as well now in the digital age!

And finally, the completed flat sweater drawing, in ink, as it appears on page 58 in the book, complete with the neck ribbing:

The number of repeats in all directions works for a sweater knitted at the sample gauge and size.

In addition to serving a specific purpose in the printed book, these drawings also provided solid reference information for the later drawings of the sweaters on people and the smaller projects being either worn or, in the case of the bag, showcased on their own.

Wash, rinse, repeat

I went through the process noted above for each of the twelve projects in the book.

I redrew most of the drawings in ink at least once. After I'd completed almost one full set of drawings, I decided that the line weights were wrong, so I changed my combination of pens and started over. It's possible that the drawings are still slightly heavier than I'd think was ideal, but they're (1) correct, (2) in proportion, and (3) clear, as well as (4) better than the first set, and the deadline was looming so they had to be declared DONE.

___

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.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: Creating the swatches and charts

This is the second 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 swatches and charts—not the most exciting visual aspect of the book, but a critically important one. I'll also take a short digression at the end to discuss the tables, because they're visual elements, too, although they mostly involve typographic treatment.

Swatches

We knitted most of the swatches twice. That wasn't the plan, but it was how things worked out. The first set would have been great for testing a design for knitting purposes but needed to be modified so we could use them as the source material for producing a book. The second set was knitted specifically to meet the needs of book reproduction. The good news is that all the swatches came in handy because we ended up needing samples of the stitch patterns in several places at once as we developed the variety of images for the project.

Here's the whole collection of swatches we ended up with:

It's hard to distinguish the two sets of texture-stitch swatches from each other, although it may be obvious that for both sets we used off-white, rather than stark white. The original set was made from a plied worsted-weight yarn. The second set was a singles heavy-worsted weight. We chose yarns and gauges that would give us good stitch definition in the scans and photographs.

The swatches were placed directly on the scanner, not photographed. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this technique. The major disadvantage is that the light is very flat, which means we've got to be sure that the dimensionality of the knitting is evident in the final images—this mattered most for the texture swatches.

You can see several differences between the two sets of swatches for the color work. For both sets, we chose a contrasting color that would be definitely different from the background color but would not be so dark that the stitch definition would be obscured. The blue-and-white are the originals; you can see on some of them that there were no border stitches planned in, so when we went to make the digital images for the book the patterned edge stitches either curled to the back or were distorted.

Distortion is always a problem in showing swatches. Sometimes I sew the knitted squares onto plastic needlework canvas to keep rows and columns of stitches aligned for scanning. Sometimes I just arrange them as straight as I can on the scanner, and adjust the swatch and rescan if they don't turn out straight enough. Even when that takes three or four scans to get a swatch done right this can be faster than the tacking. I tacked a few of these swatches for the first scans and then decided the additional work wasn't making enough difference to make it worthwhile.

Here's a scan of one of the Andean colorwork patterns (it's black-and-white because that's how it was reproduced in the book):

You can see that the columns of stitches in particular are slightly distorted. This is a function of the stranding of the colors. It wouldn't make a whit of difference in a knitted garment, but it does on the printed page. This isn't either the final scan or the final crop; it's one of the working images.

See how nicely the stitches show up in the dark areas? If we'd used black or navy, you couldn't have seen those stitches. If we'd used stark white for the light color, the definition would also have been obscured, although not as much as in a black.

Here's a scan of one of the texture stitch patterns:

It's a seed-stitch diamond, from the chapter on Denmark. It's been adjusted and cropped. The cropping on the swatches relates directly to the stitches shown in the charts, although repeats are marked on the charts. Wherever possible in this book, what you see in the chart is exactly what you see in the swatch.

Charts

Donna made putting the charts together easy for me. She provided them in Word documents (that's not the good part) composed in the Knitter's Symbols font (that is the good part).

Designed by David Xenakis of Knitter's and XRX Press, there are actually two fonts: KSymbolsW (for knitting maneuvers) and KSymbolsCP (for color changes) that constitute an incredible gift to the knitting world. Here are the basic guidelines for their use: "These fonts are Freeware. You may give them to your friends as you wish. . . . [U]se these fonts how and where you wish, but if you do use them for professional purposes, please include the words Knitter’ Symbols fonts used courtesy Knitter’s Magazine—Copyright © 1998 XRX, Inc. Otherwise, there are no restrictions on using them."

We happily credit David and Knitter's Magazine for their use and the readers of this book benefit enormously from the skill with which the fonts were developed and the generosity with which they are shared. Because these are OpenType fonts, we can use them in professional applications that sometimes choke on TrueType fonts. (TrueType fonts cause problems in print production often enough that we scrupulously avoid them. It's not good to be ready to go to press and have the printer say, "We can't print this job because it contains TrueType fonts.")

I could copy-paste the chart symbols from Donna's Word documents into boxes in InDesign and they'd show up perfectly. After setting the sizing and leading for consistency, I added line and row numbers (not in the same type box as was used for the chart symbols: I learned not to make that mistake when I assembled Arctic Lace). Then I overlaid shading to indicate the repeats and we were off and running in the chart department.

(I'm making charts by a totally different system for the next book by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, and used a third method for Priscilla's Knitting in the Old Way: we scanned in her hand-drawn charts and cleaned them up in Photoshop, and we made new charts to match the old ones by reassembling elements. If you have that book or want to borrow it from a library to check this out, you might be curious to know that the 22 drawings on pages 284 to 291 were all created from bits and pieces, modified, of the one original drawing at the bottom of page 283. We did something similar to put together the charts. This is not fast work. . . . )

Even with that huge head start from Donna, the charts went through a few stages.

Here's the first version of the chart for the seed-stitch triangles shown in the texture swatch above:

The notes above and below are reference information. The original sequencing number was 51. The chart is set at 7 points (leading also 7 points, or I would have specified). The row and stitch numbers are set in LTC Goudy Sans, the type I used for the body of the book. I love that particular type. However, it seemed to distract from the clarity of the charts. This is a case where type needs to be extremely legible but not call attention to itself.

So I substituted Gill Sans, although not in the identifying information (which was completely revamped for the final layout anyway)—just the row and stitch numbers:

The simpler numerals definitely worked better for me, although I tweaked spacing many times before considering the results "final."

I used the same solution later in parts of the tables the charts, which I'll show below.

But first I need to show what happens when a font decides to misbehave. Having done major work to get the charts to look just right, you can open your computer one day and all your beautiful diagrams may look something like this (this is a Goudy Sans version of the chart with a bad case of font amnesia in the grid sections):

That grid should look the same as the two versions above it. You do not want to have this happen on the day you are going to press. Fortunately, when this happened on Ethnic Knitting Discovery, I'd already experienced it on Arctic Lace. It's just a font thing, not flaw, a quirk. Nonetheless, it's alarming. And it can be time-consuming to fix, depending on how you've set up your charts.

Once I was certain all the Ethnic Knitting Discovery charts were the way I wanted them (because changes would be harder to make after I did this), I transferred each chart to Illustrator, converted it to outlines, and replaced the type-only version in the InDesign layout file with the Illustrator file.

Tables

Here's a small typographic digression about tables that relates to the comment on row and stitch numbers above.

Tables in books need to be clear and easy to read and to use. I also like them to be pretty, but not so pretty that they interfere with other aspects of the book (like the sweater drawings, which will be covered in an upcoming post).

Here's the first version of a small table, set in LTC Goudy Sans with a title set in LTC Francis:

I don't know if you can see clearly enough at this web quality, but using LTC Goudy Sans in the body of the table (the "Actual body measurement" and measurement boxes) seemed to me to be clunky and hard to read. I also would have needed to manually space some elements for clarity, but the effort would only have been making the best of a situation I didn't like in the first place.

So I took the Gill Sans I'd used for the row and stitch numbers on the charts and substituted it in the body of the chart. There's still some LTC Goudy Sans to give the table "flavor" and to connect it visually with the general text. (I also ended up using Gill Sans in several other other components of the book where the Goudy Sans felt like "too much": for example, the descriptive paragraphs that introduce the projects, and the individual steps in the step-by-step worksheets.)

As much as I liked the LTC Francis, I decided that I wanted something more playful for the table titles, which might otherwise be perceived as being too serious. So I switched them to Okey Dokey NF (it took about a week, off and on, to settle on this font . . . I have a lot of samples of things I tried!).

Having determined how I would handle the "backbone" visual elements of charts, swatches, and tables, I moved on to the next set of illustrations: the flat drawings of the sweaters and the schematics. They'll be the topic of another post.

___

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.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: Development of the front cover

Welcome to the ninth stop on the blog tour for Ethnic Knitting Discovery, by Donna Druchunas. I'm the book's publisher, under the name of Nomad Press. Because Nomad Press is a micropress, I also do a lot of jobs other than "publish." That's a chunk of what I talk about on this blog during regular posts.

When Donna asked what I'd like to do on this blog tour, I said something like "talk about the development of the illustrations for Ethnic Knitting Discovery."

As I began to put together a few notes for how I'd go about this, I realized that the reason it took so long to develop the illustrations is that there were a bunch of different types of images and they all required different processes to be converted from ideas to what readers see on the book's pages.

So I'm going to start here by talking about (1) the front cover. With luck and fortitude, in future days I'll also manage to assemble posts about (2) the charts and swatches, (3) the schematics and flat drawings, (4) the techniques, and (5) what we've been calling the "model shots," or project drawings. I've already started assembling the visuals for those additional posts, but let's get to the cover.

Developing the front cover for Ethnic Knitting Discovery

Cover development begins about a year before a book's intended publication date. Right now, we're working on the front cover for the next book in Donna's Ethnic Knitting series, which we plan to release in October 2008.

We begin by gathering visual resources for the cover designer to work with. Although I design Nomad publications' interiors and other materials myself, I hire other folks to do the covers. I love the synergy of this process. But it's still the author's and my responsibility to get the designers as much good stuff to work with as we can generate.

Donna worked with knitter Debbie O'Neill on ideas for the sample sweaters that would be knitted to show on the cover. We all consulted on colors; the goal was to have fun and work within the spirit of the knitting traditions presented in the book, not (for this series) to duplicate historic garments. We offered Debbie a lot of latitude to work within the philosophy of the book and design the garments using its system. The book contains brief descriptions by Debbie of how she approached her designs. This was also an opportunity for Donna to see how the book's unusual approach would work in the hands of another knitter.

The results thrilled all of us.

Then Donna and Dom took pictures. (The next three photos are copyright Dominic Cotignola.)

Here's one of the pictures of the Norwegian-style sweater—not one that was ultimately used:

And here's the child's Andean-inspired sweater—again, a photo that didn't end up in print:

We had dozens of alternatives for each garment, shot at different angles, with a variety of props, and in a lot of different ways.

We also put together supplementary images—of a globe, of yarns by themselves, of yarns and knitting needles, of many types of knitting needles all by themselves, and other things.

The goal was to give the cover designer, Monica Thomas of TLC Graphics, stuff she could play with. (Monica also designed the cover for the paperback edition of Knitting in the Old Way by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts.)

And play she did. After a while—not very long, actually—she sent us a set of ideas and asked for our reactions. It's good to have between three and five concepts initially; some will be radically different from each other, while others will be variations on a theme.

Monica gave us four designs, two variations each on two ideas. We printed them out full size and taped them to the cupboard doors in the kitchen and looked at them while we went about our daily life for a few days.

The problem we had with this selection was that everything we saw could have worked!

You can see different type treatments, color variations, photographs, emphases, and placement of elements. Sometimes there will be a part of a cover that we'll just love but we'll have to let it go because it doesn't work with the cover that ends up as the final design. That's how I feel about the edges of the title type block on the third cover from the left—in fact, about the entire sort of floating layered effect of the elements of that design.

We knew when we started this project that there would be three books in the series, so Monica began with the ideas that there should be a recognizable logo component to the cover and that the general format of the initial title would be adapted for the subsequent books.

The compass rose with the words "Ethnic Knitting" on the two lefthand covers drew us all.

When we took the cover printouts to our local bookstores to see how they looked next to a bunch of other books in the knitting section, we discovered that the layout of the two righthand covers is somewhat reminiscent of a series from another publisher (Monica didn't know this; she came up with a good solution that echoed someone else's good solution that was already in print).

The largest type in the three lefthand covers is a face that I'd been using for display type as I worked on the interior (Abbey Road, by Nick Curtis of Nick's Fonts). While I told Monica about the fonts I was using inside, she wasn't restricted to them. If she'd come up with the perfect design anchored with a different typeface, I would have modified the interior to include it, so the inside and outside of the book would be in harmony by the time we were both done.

We thought the pink in the far left version took attention away from the sweaters (plus we didn't want to "girlify" the content with pink) and that the green complemented them.

So the winner was the second version from the left, although it went through some detailed tweaking before it became the final, real cover:

The preliminary version was pretty darn close to the final. You can also see in the larger image of the final cover some of the massaging Monica did with the sweater images. She customized the backgrounds of the sweater photos to integrate them with the overall cover design and give them a sense of dimensionality.

Between initial idea and real version, we extended the height of the book by an inch, which gave us more room to work with on the cover. The subtitle ("The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes") is bigger and easier to read, as is the "Ethnic Knitting" compass rose.

Monica was able to adjust the positioning of both sweater images so the garments were cropped more intentionally. The whole lower sweater shows in the finished version, and it's easier to see the shape of the little Andean bag and to tell what the crochet hook is. The upper sweater has more room to breathe and you can see a bit of the patterning on its lower edge.

The cover design set the direction for other aspects of the book's production--for example, the green used as a second color in printing the interior keys off the green in the cover's title block.

When the front cover is done, it's put to immediate use and starts appearing on the web.

Two other critically important parts of the cover—the spine and the back cover—are designed very late in the process, perhaps a month before the book goes to press, or about ten months after the front cover process begins and about eight months after it's completed.

But that's a story for another time, and likely will be told with regard to another 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.

Scandinavian knitting conference: Rovaniemi

So yesterday I spent learning the techniques used on mittens from Rovaniemi, taught by Susanna Hansson. The group in the workshop was told that as we completed the day there are now 63 people in North America who know these techniques. There's hope for others, though, because an article on the techniques is scheduled for the January/February 2008 issue of PieceWork. The article is being written by Susanna's collaborator in recording and teaching this knitting tradition, Lene Kariniemi-Alve.

Here's Susanna pointing out the location of Rovaniemi, in Finland:

Rovaniemi is above the Arctic Circle, in a cultural area often called Lapland that includes parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and a bit of Russia.

The primary knitting technique under study is a type of intarsia worked in the round. It's unusual in execution and result. A corollary technique keeps the pattern yarns in order and prevents them from tangling.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's description of this class impelled me to cancel my second-ever trip to the Taos Wool Festival (a serious decision) and register for the Scandinavian knitting conference on the first day of sign-ups. Other compelling factors: my mother lives near the conference site, and I'm told I have Saami (Laplander) ancestors.

Here are some mittens in colors characteristic of the region:

Here are some mittens that build on tradition while straying a bit farther from it:

Here's what the workshop group accomplished in the course of the day (after our first "get the idea" samplers):

We all worked with a white background but the colors we chose for our patterning were different. That was fun.

And here's my sample, possibly a future wrist-warmer or bag, depending on how my schedule works out:

We worked with good quality wool, but the whole time I was longing for well-made handspun yarn: worsted-spun from wool grown by a breed of sheep that produces sturdy-but-soft fiber, with a fair amount of twist in both singles and plying. It's so easy to get spoiled by having worked a lot with handspun.

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The blog tour for Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting Discovery is rollicking along. I'm enjoying seeing all the different perspectives on the book.

Scandinavian knitting conference: Korsnas

I can't believe who I'm not taking workshops with this weekend. The problem is that I'd like to do everything here and there's only one of me. I could also only manage two of the three days.

So I picked the topics I was interested in that I either haven't had time yet to explore or don't have other resources to begin experimenting with, when I have time.

Yesterday I spent all day messing around with Korsnas-style knitting (I'm skipping the diacritical marks here: there are some). The Korsnas techniques are included in Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' revised version of Knitting in the Old Way, on pages 292 to 302; I've been incredibly curious about them since I edited that piece of the book and haven't had time to experiment. They come from a Swedish-speaking part of Finland and combine knitting with single crochet. Carol Rhoades, who has spent a lot of time exploring the techniques, wrote an article for the January/February 2004 issue of PieceWork (pages 42 to 47). I've also read one of the few books available in English on the subject, Decorative Crocheting, by Marketta Luutonen, Anne-Maija Backman, and Bunnar Backman (more diacritical marks missing: I'm zooming this morning, because I have another workshop to get to; I also can't find a link for it).

Yesterday's instructor was Carol Rhoades. She brought a lot of great samples and an easygoing instructional manner (easygoing even though she was on the verge of flying off to teach at SOAR in Michigan).

She brought lots of samples:

She also provided us with great handouts, and supplied two-ply Satakieli (Finnish) wool yarn. Turns out if you're going to make one of these you want yarn that will last for the ages and not pill, because it's a lot of work.

We worked on the single-crochet technique, which is pretty standard color-patterned crochet worked exclusively through the back loop, which gives a distinctive texture on the front. Although the Korsnas methods combine knitting and crochet, I didn't get to the knitting part, and I'm not sure anyone else did, either, although Sue Wills of Mew Mew's Yarn Shop, who was sitting behind me, might have. During the few moments when I looked up from my own work, I noted she was making excellent progress.

It was a really quiet class filled with people I'd love to have visited with. We were all concentrating and trying to get to the knitting part! (I like crochet: I wanted to see the transitions. Carol gave enough information that everyone should be able to handle that when the time comes.

Hmmm. I just noticed that I didn't take any photos of pieces that include the knitting part, although they were there—a hat, a mitten, and some others.

And today I drop that work and start something else.

Here's what I got done. The little white thing is a sampler to test techniques, and the red is the start of a bag that's about an inch (2.5 cm) of crochet away from the knitting part.

It's a slow technique. Carol said that there may have been professionals who did the crochet bits, moving from town to town—crochet is bottom edge of body and sleeves, and upper parts of body and sleeves. They're the places most likely to wear and the crochet's durable, as well as gorgeous. The local folks might have done the knitting (trunk part of body and middles of sleeves)—more flexible for movement and more thrify of yarn (my interpretations), plus a lot quicker to complete. Patterning in the knitted areas is simple: lice, plus small repeating motifs.

Scandinavian knitting in Seattle

I'm in Seattle to attend the first Scandinavian knitting conference, being held at the Nordic Heritage Museum. Here's Elsebeth Lavold, giving the keynote on Viking knitting—her wonderful cabling technique and design process.

There's an astonishing group of instructors gathered in one place: Vivian Høxbro (from Denmark), Annemor Sundbø (from Norway), Elsebeth Lavold (from Sweden), plus North Americans Marilyn Van Keppel (Icelandic and Danish knitting), Carol Rhoades (Finnish and Swedish knitting), Susanna Hansson (Swedish and Finnish knitting), and Terri Shea (Norwegian knitting).

Sorry about the fuzzy photograph. When I participate in events, I prefer to be present, rather than take pictures. When I'm in a place to take pictures, that's what I do instead of participating more directly. I'm here to knit.

The museum appears to have been somewhat surprised by the interest in this conference. Apparently everyone would have been pleased with 100 people. There are 200. Word got out mostly through online lists.

If they do it again (and I think it would be an excellent idea), I suspect they could have an even larger group. Whether that's a good thing for the overall experience or not depends on how it's organized. The banquet room was at capacity last night.

Although classes started yesterday, I've signed up for two and not three days. I'll begin a workshop in about an hour. So I'd better find breakfast.

Real books! Freight! Yoga! Knitting!

oKAY! Ethnic Knitting Discovery is a real book! The truck, due to arrive by 10 a.m. last Thursday because I had an appointment at 11, pulled up in front of the house at about 9:58. Just one pallet came here; two pallets went to the distributor's warehouse in Pennsylvania, which is a good thing because I don't have room for more boxes here. Well, I'd find more room, as I've done for the past two shipments, but the logistics wouldn't be pretty.

The book is.

I love slitting open the tape on a box (I pick the box that got the most dented in shipping), folding back the corrugated flaps, pulling off the layer of protective cardboard or paper, and lifting out the first copy that I've seen of the finished book.

Then I flip through the pages for the first time. They've been compressed, almost compacted, in binding and shipping. They give a slight shuffling sound as they pull apart, breathing in air and preparing to become the near-living creation that a book is, at its best.

Thursday was also the first time I'd seen the interior in the two-color printing that I designed: I specified printing in black plus a custom-mixed green (and to get more visual variety I used the inks in various percentages and also printed them over each other).

Hey, it worked!

Until 4 that afternoon, I scrambled to fill the envelopes I'd prepared (addressed and postage-applied) and to label cartons that I needed to get out to the wholesalers. The pub date is today, and my goal was to have copies in every place they needed to be by this morning, if that was humanly possible. (I also have a goal of getting this post uploaded before the end of the day. We'll see how well I do. I started it at 8 a.m. but I've needed to do a lot of other things, too.)

The book's blog tour also starts today. When we learned the printer would be finishing the job later than we expected, so we wouldn't have books until pub date, we supplied rough printouts and electronic copies to the early tour hosts. Nonetheless, I wanted to get real copies into all the tour hosts' hands as soon as possible.

Shortly after 4, I set out for UPS (the farthest shipping center from the house) on my way to Estes Park, Colorado. My daughter loaded her car with the larger shipments destined for the USPS and FedEx.

After delivering the 90 pounds of books in my car to the shipper, I turned toward the mountains.

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But first a short conceptual detour: In the midst of all that, I received a copy of a literary magazine called Pilgrimage. It's volume 32, issue 2.

It contains an essay I wrote called "Above timberline."  (The editor of Pilgrimage, Peter Anderson, also chose to publish my "Almost still-life with pages" in volume 28, number 2. In case anyone reading this is curious about what I write like . . . since mostly I publish other people's work . . . last week I put one of my essays, called "On moving into the hollow square," on a page that's part of this blog. I haven't figured out how to link directly to the page, so I've put it in a sidebar item called "Additional writing.")

Anyway, another essay is now in print. I even got paid for it! Writing essays is not a get-rich-quick activity. Neither is publishing. Both are characterized by long-delayed gratification.

It's always interesting to see who the other writers are in periodicals that have chosen to print my work. Work by my friend Susan Tweit has appeared in other issues of Pilgrimage, as has Bill Sherwonit's, and that of other good folks too numerous to mention while I'm short of time.

The new issue has contributions by folks like Aaron Abeyta, Karen Chamberlain, David Ray, and Mary Sojourner. Very good company—only one of whom I've met in person. I'd like to spend a weekend visiting with these folks.

What I did get was a weekend in the mountains doing yoga. Similar energy : different form.

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I forgot to take my camera, although I wouldn't have taken many photos anyway. I might have gotten a few of the light dusting of snow on Sunday morning. It rained Saturday. It was really hot Friday. Colorado.

At the last minute, though I didn't think I'd have time to need it, I did throw one of my knitting bags into the car, mostly because I hardly ever go anywhere without some knitting. It contained the cotton chenille gauge swatch that had decided to turn into a scarf.

I don't drive the canyon road fast; I aim for optimum speed, but I don't rush. It's a lovely two-lane highway, but too dangerous for speeding . . . a fact that doesn't register with everyone who travels it. It's narrow. It winds. Rocks fall. Oncoming traffic may be over the center line. The shoulders are narrow and the route's popular with bikes. And all that's before we mention flooding, which is rare but a big deal when it happens and doesn't always give a warning. (Thanks to a fellow I don't know called Yansa for the photos that show exactly what the road looks like, although they don't give much perspective on the height of the canyon walls.)

Mostly driving the canyon is a delight. It's just not something to do thoughtlessly.

Nonetheless, I was running late. My intention was to get to the Yoga Journal 2007 Colorado Conference in time to (1) check in for the final few days that I'd registered for, (2) find my five-roommate lodging (read "economical"), (3) get some dinner, and (4) attend the keynote, a talk I was looking forward to. Timothy McCall was speaking on yoga as medicine (actually, his topic is what yoga has to offer to medical intelligence, and vice versa).

When I arrived at registration, I discovered that it was fortunate I'd thrown a knitting bag in the car. Yoga instructor Cyndi Lee from New York was graciously convening a knitting circle in the library that evening starting at 7 (just before, and then concurrent with, the mid-week keynote). A similar gathering was scheduled for Saturday night.

I faced a difficult choice: keynote, or knitting?

It'd been a long day, after a long week:

Sorry about the muddy type below those photos. I'm not going to fix it . . . too late. The day's wrung out. The left photo is beginning of weekend, the right is end of weekend. The measurements are in P.P.S., below.

P.S. Yoga folks are great. My roommates were terrific. The knitters were fantastic: lots of different types of projects and skill levels. I left the Saturday gathering of knitters reluctantly, because I had a ticket to a concert by David Wilcox that was raising money for YouthAIDS. I had a sense that the concert was where I needed to be, although it was an extremely hard choice to make. About fifteen minutes after the performance began, I was convinced I was right. Fine songs, a set list that evolved spontaneously, and there was something extraordinary about that guitar. . . . He got it into some amazing tunings—for one number at the end of the concert he dropped the bass string lower than I'd ever heard on a regular guitar and it went there with incredible resonance and not a hint of a buzz. I mean LOW. The music: laughter and tears, sometimes simultaneously. Good.

P.P.S. Scarf notes: The scarf is 7 inches (18 cm) wide and 55 inches (140 cm) long. (It began the weekend 30 inches (76 cm) long.) It has the structure of a seaman's scarf, a form also used as one of the skill-building projects in Ethnic Knitting Discovery. The scarf's divided roughly into thirds: stockinette, ribbing, stockinette. There's a 3-stitch edging of seed stitch along each long edge and four rows of seed stitch at each end. That isn't enough to keep the ends as square as I'd like—this did start as a gauge swatch, so I didn't plan its end finishes. The long edges are fine. I'll probably stabilize the ends with single crochet. Because cotton isn't very elastic, and cotton chenille just might be even less elastic than other cottons, the ribbing doesn't pull in as it would on a wool scarf. However, the drape of the ribbed area is different from that of the stockinette sections and should nestle neatly around a neck. What this fabric will really look and behave like, of course, will be revealed after it is washed.