The Independent Stitch

UK Knit Camp aftermath, and human/dog creative play

I'm working on another post about UK Knit Camp. I don't know when I'll get it finished, but in the interim I have been doing what I think is an amazing job of dealing with the follow-up stress.

Yet there have been indicators that all is not as mellow as I wish, perhaps because I've been on the road a lot and my yoga practice has been even more abbreviated than usual.

The mess is not the item on the right, which is proof that despite the fact that Ceilidh is amazingly calm for a year-old Border collie she is a Border collie. She has already removed the tennis ball from the end of her new rope toy (it took her two days: Ariel would have completed the job in less than 20 minutes). The toy still works just fine for playing tug, which is its purpose.

The mess is the item on the left. When I got the call asking me if I could get to Cleveland to tape two segments for Knitting Daily TV, I realized that my wardrobe did not meet the criteria for clothing. T-shirts don't cut it. While I have a closet full of handknits, none of them is TV-ready. They're too warm, have the wrong sleeve lengths, are in the wrong colors, or have necklines unable to accommodate a mic. (I received very detailed instructions. I will also need to get a manicure. Plain polish. That part's okay. The time and the expense of getting it done will try my patience, however.)

I thought that I just might be able to knit something in time, if I kept it simple. I found a pattern (one likely to be troublefree), buzzed over to a nearby shop and found yarn, and started knitting in my spare time. When the body was about 2 inches (5cm) along, I spread the fabric out on the bed, smoothed it thoroughly to check that I hadn't twisted the cast-on (which I'd already checked before and after knitting the first round, of course), and re-measured my gauge, which was right on. So I kept moving.

When the body was about 5 inches (12.5cm) long, I started to knit on it during a meeting and something felt wrong. I knitted a couple of rows and got that sinking feeling. I stretched out the fabric and moved the circular needle this way and that, hoping that it would straighten out into a tube. It wouldn't.

Despite my 2-inch check (I smoothed it out fully on the bed), it appeared to be true that I had managed to put a full twist into the starting row. I asked a knitterly friend if my brain was deceiving me. She said it was not. I took the object home and asked my daughter to confirm that I was seeing what I was seeing. She did.

There's no way I'll make that deadline. A friend has loaned some alternatives, but I'm supposed to have multiple choices (in case the TV stylists don't like what I offer) and each episode has to have different clothes. Fortunately, only the TOP matters. I can wear slacks that I already own. I've headed to TJMaxx and Marshall's to fill the gaps as inexpensively as possible. AARGH.

I have never missed a cast-on twist for more than one row beyond the start. It's a sign. All is not quite well balanced around here.

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My recent travel book was Jon Franklin's The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection between Humans and Dogs. It's a personal exploration by an experienced (Pulitzer-winning) science writer on some questions that began bugging him, like why humans and dogs have been hanging out together for so long and why they continue to do so. He ventures some theories that he doesn't present as more than that, and that may agree or disagree with other folks' ideas, but I found it a fascinating ramble through observation and, among other things, brain science by a smart guy who's got enough background to say interesting things.

Ceilidh

And looking at a similar topic from a completely different angle:

Tussah

News of the choreographed rock video with OK Go and a dozen dogs has been traveling around the internet, but in case you haven't seen it here's the YouTube location (3.5 minutes). It might be seen as a visual representation of some of the ideas in Franklin's book.

Here's the story behind making the video; that link has another link to the video at its top.

. . . and here, just for quirkiness, is a parody involving a cat (1 minute). . . .

Photo shoot post 5: styling

This continues (and completes) my series of posts on the photo shoot of the fibers for the book that Storey Publishing will release next spring . . . in either very late April or early May; I am hoping and trusting it will be ready by the first full weekend in May!

Today's topic is photo styling, which means arranging everything that will appear within the boundaries of the photographed image so that it is beautiful and serves all of its purposes. For a book like this, those purposes include conveying information clearly, working consistently with the other images in the book, contributing to the mood of the work as a whole, and so on.

You could say that the photo below has been styled, although not for the purposes I just listed:

That's a snapshot I took with my little camera of a few of the fibers that I pulled from the files to contribute to the section opener for the Northern European Short-Tailed sheep. The breeds above are Finn (on the left) and Icelandic (on the right). In this group, I also pulled samples of Manx Loaghtan, North Ronaldsay, and Shetland. For each section opener, my job is to come up with clean locks and skeinlets that demonstrate either the range of fibers within a group or the most characteristic types of fibers in that group. I get to set the criteria as well as pick out the samples. Because we are dealing with a lot of fibers at once and they get jumbled during styling, I have been taking quick snapshots of the raw materials in case a sample escapes from its labels. They do that.

It is the responsibility of art director Mary Velgos and photographer John Polak to make sure the fibers end up looking far better than they do in my reference snapshots.

Mary is the photo stylist (not always a job done by the art director), although John contributes information on how her proposed choices will photograph. What we see with our eyes is not always what the camera sees and records, especially when we're dealing with subtleties of color and texture.

Mary starts the styling process by consulting her computer. It tells her not only what needs our attention next but also how that piece of the project relates to the whole.

I've written before about the computers and the backgrounds. Mary and John begin by putting down the mat board (bottom level) and then positioning the piece of barn board that identifies the group of fibers to be photographed. The board changes position on the table depending on whether the image will be a righthand page, a lefthand page, a spread (two opposite pages shot as one continuous image), or something else. In the photo below, I think Mary's setting up a spread.

John's looking through his camera to be sure everything's in exactly the right position. For this book, the camera has mostly stayed in one place so that all the fibers that are meant to be compared to each other (almost all of them) are being shot at the same size.

(The backgrounds, boards, and fabrics, as well as people's clothes, may change randomly in this sequence of images. I did not take all of these snapshots at the same time: I had to sneak them in between my other responsibilities.)

Next Mary tries out fabrics. Because for most of the shots the fibers are surrounded by the selected fabric color, it takes a while to figure out which of the many colors to use for a given group. Mary and John may be smiling in the next photo because the piece of wool Mary's holding is the one that came to be known as "Mary's favorite."

But if John expressed reservations about how a given color would work, she'd try another, like this plummy-fuchsia:

. . . or maybe this blue. . . .

Once the preliminary choices have been (probably) made, John checks positioning again and Mary brushes off bits of fiber, wood, and dust that may have accumulated. These specks can be removed from the digital files later with Photoshop, but it's a whole lot easier (especially when there are many photographs) to eliminate them before they ever become pixels needing to be fixed.

Finally the background is (probably) set.

Part of the positioning of the background elements in relation to the camera involves placing paper markers to show where the edges of the page occur. For a spread, this includes a guide for the gutter (the area in the center of the book that will go into the binding). Then it's time for Mary to arrange the fibers.

With the rough placement set, Mary puts the identifying cards on the fibers and John takes a reference photo (his being much classier than mine).

The cards come off and John starts taking test photos. Mary continues to check placement of the items, and we all look at the preliminary images in the layout file and then move this or that item by a millimeter or two, or replace it entirely. When we're all happy (although I may have spent most of the adjustment time over with my deck of cards, being sure we're not missing any items) . . .

. . . someone says, "Let's shoot it," and John takes at least three bracketed exposures, while Mary and I make sure not to be walking around so the floor doesn't vibrate.

The results look so simple.

Then we put those bits of fiber and mat board and barn board and fabric away, and Mary starts styling the next photo.

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Update

We've finished the photo sessions, including the section openers and a couple of cover prospects. I get to go home for a while.

However, at the end of this four-day session of work I had most of a day to keep my feet on the ground here in New England. I spent the time writing outlines for two segments of Knitting Daily TV that I'll be recording soon (paperwork due today), and also visited the Jones LIbrary in Amherst to see a painting of Emily Dickinson by Guillermo Cuéllar, a friend of mine from way back. I sat in the library's special collections room and read the paper Guillermo wrote on his method of doing the painting, including the research he did before he began to paint (part of the paper is available online). Although all of his comments were interesting, I was most intrigued by his remarks about the textiles. Apparently he was unable to find anyone's determination about whether the tablecloth in the famous daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson was printed or double-woven. I'd be curious about digging into that myself, if I had time. . . . I have a guess, but it's just a gut reaction.

The trees are beginning to turn a bit.

But for those who have plans in a few weeks to come see the colors, don't worry: most of the landscape has not changed yet. Although the photo above was taken quickly, when I was going more slowly I looked more at leaf shapes to see if I could figure out which were changing and maybe why. At that point, the color I saw was in the sumacs and in some oaks that may have been stressed this year.

Just enough bright reds and oranges for me to enjoy. They remind me of when this area was home.

Traveling spindle kit

As an interruption to the coverage of the photo shoot, here's some information on the traveling spindle kit that has worked out best for me, thanks to those who have asked.

Here's my spindle kit in the middle of a set-up for a picture of, oh, let's see: Rambouillet.

Here's what's inside the container, which I got at a hardware store. It's intended for storing miscellaneous tools and parts:

• A black spinning cloth (more useful with a wheel, but I find it helpful to have one around; I could leave it out and have more room for fiber).
• A clip-on reading light. This could also be replaced by fiber.
• Spindle: essential. This is a Magpie Woodworks Magpie small top-whorl spindle, although I have a number of simple spindles that fit into this case so I can choose the tool to fit the fiber I'm carrying. The length of the shaft and diameter of the whorl are the dimensions that need to be taken into account.
• Niddy noddy. I improvise ball winders out of empty t.p. rolls all the time, but prefer to have a real (if small) niddy handy. This one makes a 24-inch skein.
• Fiber: I can fit an amazing amount of fiber around the tools. What's shown here are just scraps that I was spinning samples from (Targhee wool, both roving and top).
• Container, with lid off. It's a Crown Bolt clear can storage container, 2.75 x 8 inches. I got it at Home Depot. This size is available in our local store, although it's not listed on the web site. There's a slit in the lid that can be used to put things in and out of the tube without opening the whole thing if you're using it for its intended purpose (as I'm not). When the tube is used for a spindle, that slit means if the spindle's a tad too long it can still fit adequately. 

Here are the contents, ready to be loaded:

 

The niddy noddy has been disassembled and the reading light and the black cloth have been folded up.

Loading sequence is important. The spindle tip goes in early, but is not put all the way in right away.

The light and the niddy get tucked in under the whorl. I also stuff in as much fiber as I want at this point. If I have different types of fibers, I wrap them in small pieces of well-worn scrap fabric. If keeping the fibers separated isn't important, I just arrange them neatly in any open spaces and push the spindle down after them.

Then I put the spindle in place.

There's a whole lot more room for fiber in there . . . especially if the black cloth and reading light are eliminated or packed elsewhere.

I love the niddy noddy, although I don't know where to get one exactly like this today. If I were looking now, I'd check out a Magpie Woodworks sampler-size niddy or David Reed Smith's currently available adjustable niddy.

What's most interesting to me about this combination is the number of corners of my luggage or backpack into which it can be tucked at the last minute, even when I am packed to capacity. It's rigid enough to fully protect the contents, and exceptionally lightweight. It's not sweetly handcrafted, and it is plastic. But it's see-through, which is very handy and not something I could arrange for with other practical materials.

Photo shoot post 4: staging

It's true: I have been doing a few things at the photo shoots other than taking snapshots of other people while they work. In fact, I've been on my feet and moving around at least 90 percent of the time; comfortable shoes have been my most important wardrobe item. The other 10 percent of the time I can sit next to my computer on a wooden stool and give my feet a break.

My job, which I think of as staging the materials for the photos, is to:

• select the fibers, yarns, and other bits that will be in each picture,
• move them smoothly to the area where the shot(s) will be taken,
• be sure that what shows in the finished image is what needs to be there (although I'm only taking time to check this when art director Mary Velgos and photographer John Polak have questions—during the first day of our work together, we established general principles that solve many issues without my additional photo-specific input),
• retrieve the fibers after they have been photographed,
• restore the items to their folders and file boxes, and
• maintain a tracking system that double-checks that we aren't missing anything.

In between, I have been helping Mary figure out if we need to expand the number of pages allocated for this or that breed (or whether we can, perhaps, condense one section or another, thus gaining pages to be used elsewhere). This sometimes involves judgment calls about placement of information, and sometimes requires me to write or rewrite material.

In one case, Carol Ekarius and I had written a one-paragraph introduction to a section. Mary's layout calls for a spread for each section-opener (lots of photos on the left, text on the right). That paragraph looked lonely and the page looked bare. Something had to be done about it. Fortunately, we discovered the situation on Wednesday. I spent that day and the next mulling what could be added that would not just be filler but would increase the value of the book, and doing a bit of research through my files to come up with supporting information. On Friday, I wrote new text, using my computer. Then I loaded the additional material on a USB drive, walked over to Mary's layout computer, inserted the text into InDesign on the page in question . . . and then got to trim it by about half, so it would fit!

In many cases, I'm cutting a few lines so we can get the photos to work smoothly and beautifully in the layout. Fortunately, even after several rounds of editing there are almost always surplus words that can be eliminated without decreasing the amount of information. Doing this work within the actual book production file means I can cut exactly the right number of words in exactly the right places to make the copyfitting adjustments perfect, instead of having to guess from across the country which changes might have the desired results. Familiarity with both book layout and InDesign are serving me well in these tasks.

But back to the responsibilities that are taking most of my time during the shoot. . . .

My primary working area is a 4 x 8-foot (1.2m x 2.4m) table (supported on sawhorses) roughly 6 feet (2m) from where the photos are being taken. Here's how I set it up:

Each of those manila pockets is a breed or type of fiber. The pockets along the back of the table are sorted into groups of "just finished" and "to be shot soon." (There are many file boxes elsewhere in the studio that contain previous and future days' work.) The pockets lying flat on the table are in the immediate line-up to be photographed. The plastic bags (on top of their respective pockets) contain extra fibers. For example, whenever I had enough fiber available I packed extra locks of wool so that if our first choice gets messed up we have a backup. They are also where the fibers to be photographed come from, and where they go back to. There is a set of plastic bags for each individual type of fiber.

This detail from the image above shows a sequence of fibers that will be photographed together, laid out on a scrap of mat board so they can be carried undisturbed over to the shooting area:

Those samples happen to be a bunch of gorgeous Lincolns grown and contributed by Christiane Payson at North Valley Farm (Oregon) or gathered and contributed by Beth Smith at The Spinning Loft (Michigan).

I'll talk about the cards in front (with the green dots) in a moment.

Here's part of another set of samples ready to go into a photo set-up—these are some of the North Ronaldsays, which were collected and shared by Jennifer Heverly of Spirit Trail Fiberworks (Virginia) or grown by June Morris (North Ronaldsay, Scotland) and sent to us by way of June Hall (Cumbria, England):

The small white tags are identifiers that travel to the photo table and back with the fibers. In this case, there are manila skein tags with two of the sets because their white tags were used for another purpose (to identify the last-minute knitted and woven swatches) and went AWOL in the process. No matter how many labels I have printed for each type of fiber, we often run out. . . . Once the completed photo has been shot, the white tags are set on top of the fibers and a reference image is made, to facilitate the writing of captions later.

My big table is near another table with an iron, which is plugged in and constantly hot, that I use to give shots of steam to skeinlets (to restore their "airiness" after having been packed tightly into folders and boxes) and, less often, to locks of wool that have been bent while they were being transported. I also have been steaming some of the background fabrics for Mary while she's setting up a shot (more on the set-up in the next, and final, installment in this series). The "ironing board" is a terrycloth towel on the metal surface of the other table.

Here's my primary table when a set of fibers has moved over to Mary's and John's area:

The white cards with the green dots tell me what fibers are out working at the moment. The snapshot below shows one of the images about ready to be photographed, with its backgrounds in place. Outside the edges of the image area, you can see some of the the tiny cards that were below the skeins and locks when I set them out and that will be laid on top of the locks for the extra picture that gives us a detailed record of which fiber was which. One card is on the wood just above a set of locks. Another is farther away, on the very edge of the scrap foam core that was used to transport this group of samples. Based on positioning of fibers and the cards we can see, the third card for this group is probably out of sight on the left.

Now more about those cards with the green dots. I made a record card for every fiber I processed. The basic materials consist of old business cards (their nice blank back sides coming into play) and one of the large-size fiber labels. Originally, these cards accompanied the fibers through the washing process and identified the drying fibers. Now they've got a new job.

The boxes below contain the cards for the wools: those yet to be shot are on the left, and those for which we have completed the pictures are on the right (with the date of the image added in the upper right corner).

Based on the number of cards in each box, I'd guess that I took that picture on about the fourth day of the sheep-fiber photo shoot. A green dot means that I spun a sample skein of the fiber (most of the cards have green dots). A red dot means that for some reason the fiber I received was not of good enough quality to spin. Sometimes I had to spin red-dot fibers because we couldn't get any better fiber (in which case a green dot was added). A yellow dot means that the fiber was not spinnable for some reason not related to quality. Often a yellow-dot sample consists of a collection of small locks to show color variety.

A couple of fiber packets got special, handwritten labels:

I'm allergic to something that came along with that particular wool. It may have been a type of grass or a chemical the sheep was treated with. In this case, once the fiber was clean I didn't have any problems with it. However, we're photographing locks of wool straight from the sheep, so that baggie is marked. I left the fiber in the bag until just before it was photographed and put it back in immediately after the picture was done. A few fibers ended up marked this way because they'd been stored in mothballs.

Mostly we don't have pictures of me working, because I was taking pictures of other people working. However, John took my camera and caught me spinning a last-minute sample of extra-wonderful Shetland that I got from Oliver Henry, of Jamieson and Smith, when I was at UK Knit Camp in Stirling, Scotland. (I don't usually spin with my hands that far overhead so my neck tips back; I was trying to do something specific with a tiny bit of fiber and the not-quite-perfect tool.)

The spindle I had with me was too heavy, but I couldn't resist doing the best I could with the tools at hand to get that particular wool into the book.

For reasons of packing space (and weight) and financial constraints, I only brought a few tangible treasures back from my trip to Scotland and England. One of those items was my mascot for the first seven days of shooting:

It's a needle-felted Herdwick sheep made by by Ellie Rowell of the cooperative Wool Clip gallery in Cumbria. Yes, the body is Herdwick wool. I'm very fond of this little creature and when the days of photography got long during the first shoot, it made me smile. It's since taken up residence next to my main computer in my home office, where it also makes me smile.

Introducing our new pup for real

Our new family member has a name. Also a microchip (a very good addition, because she has a reputation as an escape artist . . . we are accustomed to escape artists and keep our fence in good repair, but we also like additional safety nets for the return of any potential wanderers).

She is:

Tempest's Ceilidh Sora

Call name pronounced "kaylee"

She seemed to respond to this name immediately. We had sorted through a couple of dozen names, working from an array of criteria. And these are the stories behind our choices:

Tempest: The "kennel" name for our rescues. When Ceilidh is registered for her AKC-ILP number (so she can enter obedience or agility trials at shows, should she ever want to), this will be an official part of her name. The "tempest" comes both from the Shakespearean play and from the first dog in this series, Ariel, who was almost literally saved from a tempest, having been abandoned at the age of 7 weeks in hole in an open field in late December (with two siblings: all, miraculously, survived, although that was questionable for the first 24 hours after they were found).

Ceilidh: A social gathering involving music and storytelling. Probably spinning and knitting, too. This pup's movements seem to suit fiddle music, more likely jigs than reels.

Kaylee: A character in Firefly with a personality that seems to parallel that of this dog.

Sora: Offered by my Finnish exchange sister, this is the word for gravel, a link to the pup's shelter name of Pebbles.

Sora: My daughter also enjoys that this name represents a character (albeit male) in the computer game Kingdom Hearts.

Sora: Also, in Japanese, sky.

Yesterday morning, along with her name and her microchip, Ceilidh had her first play sessions with Tussah, our older dog. This was day 4 of their being together. Since their initial meeting last Sunday, the two dogs have behaved as if they'd known each other already for so long that they were not especially interested in interacting.

Ceilidh initiated the first round of play; Tussah initiated the second. They tore up the living room (not a problem) and then played chase around the kitchen counter (through dining area, kitchen, and living room, circularly).

Although Ceilidh is obviously different from Ariel (our previous Border collie) in many ways, she also displays many behaviors (already) that remind us of Ari and make us smile. For example, at the moment Ceilidh is asleep in her crate, lying on her back, with her paws in the air. There are a handful of other behaviors we have seen in these two Border collies that we have not seen in the other dogs we have lived with for long or short times—Aussie, poodle, mutt, Golden, Springer, Westie, Corgi, Tussah-mix, hound, Husky. The family resemblance is, of course, charming.

Welcome to Ceilidh, one smart pup who will be lots easier to work with on training now that we all know who she is!

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The next post will return to the photo shoot account.

Photo shoot post 3: backgrounds

Backgrounds aren't something that you notice immediately when you look at the finished products of a photo shoot. What you see (ideally) is the item that is the primary subject of each photo. Yet backgrounds are critically important to the overall flavor of a book, magazine, or website, and to your ability to notice the foreground items that you came to the publication to see.

For the book part of The Project, art director Mary Velgos spent a lot of prep time first figuring out a layout concept (which she needed to do in consultation with a number of other involved people at all levels of Storey Publishing) and then gathering the materials to make her concept work in the studio. I'm skipping to the end part of that here, since it's what pertains directly to the photo shoot.

For the part of the photography that I'm describing here, Mary's challenge involves making visual sense of the bits and pieces of textile that I am providing (locks, both raw and clean, and small amounts of yarn) plus a bunch of tiny swatches (woven and knitted from my handspun by other folks). She's working with natural-colored fibers ranging from white to black (with gray-toned and brown-toned spectra), and from very large to tiny.

She developed a vision that includes several layers of background. Her intention is to give the reader a sense of immediacy in encountering the fibers on the printed page. That means the two-dimensional images need to feel three-dimensional, and the varied tactile qualities of the fibers need to predominate.

Each page has a background color that is provided by a piece of pastel matboard. The boards have to be pastel so that overprinted type can be easily read. Photographer John Polak is shooting so that the subtle texture inherent to matboard doesn't become a distraction.

Why not take what appears at first glance to be the easy way out and simply build this bottom layer of color in InDesign? Because the shadows of the upper layers form an important part of the effect of the whole, finished image and cannot be produced well enough that way. Mary's way of putting this together and John's ability to translate it to digital photographs are, frankly, pure genius: genius informed by experience.

Interestingly, even though a trip to an art store shows myriad colors of matboard, there really aren't quite enough different shades of pastels. . . . Mary and John keep wishing for more. . . .

The next layer consists of weathered wood—what we refer to as barn board, although some of it has come from barns and some from other places. Before we ever got to the studio, Mary spent a lot of time collecting boards. Here's some of what she came up with:

Closer looks at some of the boards:

We're all getting to know every knot and striation in these pieces of woods extremely well. All of the fibers are being shot with the camera at the same distance from the subject. That means that the sizes and shapes of the boards determine how they can be used; the camera can't just be moved closer or farther away. There's no fudge factor. Some pieces of wood are large enough to work on a spread (a double-page image), while others can only be used when we need, say, half a page or two-thirds of a spread.

Although there is no fudge factor, tools have come in handy . . . tools like hammer, saw, and drill. Some of the board sets have been deconstructed so they will fit in the image area. When this is the case, John's highly developed photographic savvy comes in handy.

The Project is big enough that by a few days into the shoot Mary was wishing for even more choices of barn board.

Choosing the board for a particular sequence of shots involves looking ahead to see what sizes of shots will be required and whether the boards under consideration will accommodate them. When we have a particularly large set that requires the same boards (there is a logic to the way the boards are used, one which will create strong, but not obvious, visual integration in the completed book), one of the questions is whether we'll still like the boards by the end of a full day of working with them!

The top level of the background consists of a piece of hand-dyed wool fabric. Here's the lovely array of possibilities at the beginning of a set of shots:

They seem to have been dyed to correspond with the colors in one of the paintings John has hanging in his loft:

Here are some of the cool colors:

Here's a mix of the warm options:

Here's Mary, coming to select a color or two to test for a shot early in the day:

And by the end of the day, here's what the rack looks like, with the fabrics we've used removed (so they won't be repeated too close to each other in the flow of the book). . . .

And here are the fabrics that have been used during the day:

Before we all get together to shoot the "other fibers" (having completed the wool in our last session), Mary intends to get a few more colors of fabric to work with. If the shop had been open either before or after the hours of our shoot, we would have gotten more to use during this group of shots. (We were shooting from about 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Sunday, and the fabric source is open noon to 5, Tuesday through Saturday. The shop is far enough from the studio that just running out for a quick re-stocking trip wouldn't work.)

How does all this stuff go together?

In what I have come to think of as a "background sandwich": matboard, then barn board, then fabric . . . and finally the locks, skeinlets, and tiny swatches that are the point of it all:

In the finished book, one specific type of barn board is being used for each family or group of fibers. Within that group, each individual breed or type of fiber has a unique combination of matboard and fabric. This gives unity to the group while distinguishing the breeds and types. The entire, complex interplay seems very simple and gives the flow of the layout both unity and diversity.

It's a whole lot of work that will not be in-your-face in the finished product.

And it's totally ingenious.

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Next post in this sequence: What I'm doing while Mary and John are producing their wonderful images.

Photo shoot post 2: computers

I'll tell you, a whole lot of stuff that's happening on the photo shoot for the book aspect of The Project could not take place if the whole bunch of us didn't have decades of experience in our own pieces of the process. Working together has been sweet. I hadn't met any of these folks in person before, except for editor Gwen Steege. What a delight it has been for me to work with these gifted and dedicated people. My apprehension quickly turned to trust. They were apprehensive about having me there, too: authors are not normally allowed anywhere near a photo shoot, with good reason. Mine was an unusual case. What I contributed will be shown in more detail in a future post.

As we began our first work on the photoshoot, feeling our way into the process and into working together, I noticed how many computers were in the room.

One computer is connected to photographer John Polak's camera.

Images that John shoots go directly to this computer. For the preliminary shots, John pulls each photo into Photoshop, drops a grid over it, and we check precisely where everything in the image will end up being on the pages of the finished book. Thanks to a huge amount of preparatory work by me and the editors and art director Mary Velgos, we are shooting to fit a planned layout. John's expertise lets us see exactly what we're doing at every step along the way.

Neither Mary's nor John's working process is a no-brainer: both are depending on years of experience. It looks easy now. I'm just in the background thinking how cool it is they can do this, and knowing what it takes to get to the point where they can.

Once we have everything in the right places (more on that in another post), John brackets his exposures and checks their levels, also on this computer.

Meanwhile Mary, who is the photo stylist in addition to the art director and book designer, has a computer on which she's keeping track of our progress and looking ahead to the next few shots.

The supervisor in that snapshot is a (wool) stuffed lamb toy I was given by a representative of the British Wool Marketing Board whom I'd met the previous week in Cumbria, England.

In the next photo, you can see where Mary's tracking computer sits in relation to the photo area. In this snapshot, John's getting ready to take a preliminary shot. When he does the final bracketed exposures, Mary and I need to freeze in place because the wooden floor vibrates and ruins the focus. John's studio is in a fantastic old mill building that has a few quirks; in addition to the flexible floor, there's the question of the elevator, which appears to be original equipment. The joke when we get on it is, "Did you remember to bring your cell phone?" Despite the building's historic fittings, I would love to have the kind of space provided by these studios.

For all of the technical fiber shots, John's camera remains in exactly the same position. The fibers will all be shown at the same scale, and it's part of John's work to make sure that the locations of all the components of the shoot remain consistent.

Mary has another computer (also a laptop, but a more powerful one) set up at the kitchen counter, about 10 feet (3m) to the left of her computer shown above. She's using that second computer to do layout adjustments as we go.

In my set-up area, which I'll visit in more detail in another post, I have my laptop, shown here closed (with its GelaSkins cover). Like Mary, I'm using my computer to track where we are in the sequence. In my case, this is so I can prepare sample sets in advance of when they're needed. I'm also rewriting text, when necessary, to accommodate shifts in layout that we decide to make on the fly, as well as checking details of the fibers as I set them out, using my research files, spinning notes, and the copy of the manuscript that Carol Ekarius and I originally turned in.

Sometimes when I'm revising text in response to adjustments required by our photo decisions, I just sit down at Mary's layout computer and work directly in her InDesign files; sometimes I'll draft copy on my computer and then "sneakernet" it to Mary's and do the final polishing there. That is, I'll load my file on a USB drive, if any one of us can locate a USB drive, and walk it over.

John's computers are networked and one of them has access to the internet, but otherwise we are dependent for basic connectivity on the ever-disappearing thumb drives. I've taken to wearing mine on a lanyard around my neck. John's USB drive was hiding somewhere in the studio for most of the week I'm documenting here (it finally surfaced). Mary has a portable hard drive that works with some of our computers but not others (because of its firewire connection). Ah, technology. (On a couple of days, someone in the building who has a wireless router left the security off and I could reach the internet for a short while. Otherwise: blackout. I did basic e-mail triage every morning at a coffee shop during the few minutes it took the barista to make my chai.)

Every day, Mary's been driving back and forth between her home and the studio, an hour and a quarter each way. I've been commuting either from a motel 10 miles (16km) down the road or from some friends' house 45 minutes away (much, much pleasanter, in every regard except distance).

We're using natural light, so we start each day's shoot when Mary can reasonably get to the studio and we end when we lose the light—about 7 p.m. John adjusts his camera's settings at least once an hour to adjust to the changing illumination. We need to complete each set of shots within a relatively short period of time so that images that need to match have all been taken in the same light.

After Mary and I leave, John turns to his larger computer, shown below, to process the images: he selects the best exposures and adjusts the levels so they'll reproduce well in print. Then he burns CDs for Mary to use when she does the final layout.

Mary has also been taking home CDs John has made for her that contain rough, unprocessed copies of the images to plug into the layout file as we go. She's been keeping ahead of us with the layout and double-checking our results. I'm not entirely sure she's been sleeping. Note that we all worked the planned five days in this sequence and then we also all decided to work, without taking a break, through the weekend.

Computer inventory:

1. Mary's small laptop by the shooting area, for planning the next shot
2. Mary's larger laptop in the kitchen, for keeping the layout adjusted and ahead of where we are
3. John's laptop in the shooting area, attached to the camera
4. John's desktop, for finishing work on the images
5. My laptop, in the setup area, for my tracking and planning and revisions

I've been doing photoshoots for more than twenty-five years, so I'm amazed at our dependency on, and the advantages of working with, computer technology. We no longer have to wait around for Polaroids to develop. We can plug the preliminary or final images into a layout grid immediately and see how they'll work. At the end of the day, we have completed, digital images that can be used in layout—we don't have to go through the steps of sending film to the lab and awaiting its return, picking it up, sending it to a separator to be turned into printer-ready film (or to a service bureau to be converted to digital format), and so on.

The number of shots we complete in a day is probably about the same as it used to be. On the first day, I think we did ten. As we worked out our techniques, we sped up, and by the end of the seven days I think we were shooting about nineteen a day. Yet the post-shoot work has been greatly simplified and expedited by the new technology.

I'm writing all of this in the present tense because we're not done. We did finish the wool photos in those seven days, but we will be getting together again soon to do the rest of the fibers.

I'll end with one more photo of the working process: Mary on the phone checking in with someone back at the office about a detail we need to know, and John doing final adjustments on some of the final shots.

Where am I? Probably putting the fibers we've just finished with back into their file folders, or pulling out the next group of items to have their pictures taken.

Photo shoot post 1: getting started

I've been saying I'd get some posts up about one of the photo shoots for the book on fibers that Carol Ekarius and I are doing for Storey Publishing. The book is due to be released late in April 2011. One of the reasons I've been holding off on these posts is that they're complicated! So I'm going to break them into sections and I'm not even going to attempt to be comprehensive or particularly coherent in what I say.

The photos that we are producing are gorgeous, and although I say "we," because I'm contributing some critical pieces to the work, that's a fact for which I can take no credit at all. I think what's interesting that I can convey here is the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to create the exquisite and informative photos that will be such a huge part of the completed book.

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This was actually the second shoot for the book, and there will be at least one more. During the first set of photos, the art director, Mary Velgos, and the photographer, John Polak, completed the images of the items we've collected to demonstrate uses of some of the fibers. I didn't need to be present for that one. For the technical fiber images, though, I had to be behind the scenes for the whole time.

Who was at the shoot? You'll see photos of most of us as I write this series.

For the entire shoot:

• Mary Velgos, art director and photo stylist (also graphic artist and layout person for the book)
• John Polak, photographer
• Deborah Robson, writer/spinner

For the first few days:

• Gwen Steege, the book's primary editor on the fiber side (the project involves both fiber and livestock divisions)
• Sarah Guare, project editor for the book

We also had a visit from Pam Art, president of Storey, with whom we got to share what we were up to. I forgot to get a snapshot of Pam, because we were so busy showing her what we were doing. She was there at the end of the third day of the seven in this sequence.

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Because of the challenges of everyone's schedules, I flew directly from Glasgow to Massachusetts for the shoot, after teaching at UK Knit Camp. I carried a few supplies for the shoot to Europe and back! (I didn't want to trust shipping them.)

While I was teaching, editor Gwen Steege had arranged for two other people to make small swatches with my handspun yarn, to hint at how they would work up into fabrics.

They were simple swatches, either knitted in stockinette or woven on a 2-inch (5 cm) Weavette (Weave-It-type) loom. There wasn't time to do swatches for everything that could have been swatched. The swatches Gwen brought to the shoot initially were still drying from their light blocking, and more were picked up from the sample-makers between days of shooting. (I'd wanted some crochet swatches as well, and perhaps some basketry and felting, but time and yarn quantities precluded those possibilities. There is at least one crochet swatch, which I made on site.)

All the tiny swatches still needed to be steamed and then put with the other parts of their fibers' packets.

The labels were written with Sharpie pens on bits of Tyvek envelope, so they would stay intact through washing.

As a control freak, it was hard for me to not do this work myself. Yet the decision to make all the swatches occurred while I was on the road. The best news is that the person who wove all the tiny samples had never done any weaving before, and she came out of this task intrigued and ready to explore the craft more!

I had to ignore the fact that my handspun was being cut into bits (I know, I know: I'm really possessive of my handspun) and I might have made the swatches differently. I have needed to keep remembering that what I'm making here is a book, not any normal textile project. I have more to say about that at a later date . . . possibly much later, since it's going to take a while just to hit the high points of this one photo shoot. But yes, it's been hard to be spinning samples for three years and not be able to make anything textile-like out of what I've been producing. Even swatches.

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As part of the photo-planning process (which has been going on for months), the decision was also made to have each skeinlet of the various fibers consist of five strands, wound on a sample niddy-noddy. Some, but not all, of the skein-winding had been done before the shoot started. Editor Sarah Guare spent a thrilling few days continuing this job (for which her excellent college education was not required). This wasn't a job I volunteered for, because it involved . . . cutting my handspun into more bits. As long as I didn't have to do it, or watch too closely, it wasn't too painful.

I can tell the photo above was taken in the afternoon. Sarah's hair started the day down, but as the sun came in the windows from the west the studio heated up quite a bit and she tucked it up. She spent hours doing this job.

Sometimes she got to stand up briefly.

(That was a morning shot.)

This went on for a while. Only the clothing and the fibers changed.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were busy elsewhere in John's loft, the big room where we planned to spend five days getting all the photos done. We spent five days . . . and then added two more, over the weekend, and got the wools done. I'm going back for another four or five days to do the "other critters."

More in the next installment.

New-to-us rescue Border collie!

We have a new member of the family.

The addition seems sudden to us, although it feels really right, and only the last couple hours of the process took place in a hurry. We went to meet a dog. Within minutes, we knew she would fit into our family (although we spent more time with her before we said that out loud), and she ended up coming home with us directly from the first meeting.

Here's the slow part: Over the past nine months, since we lost our Border collie-ish Ariel to old age, I have on a handful of occasions tempted fate by browsing our region's Australian shepherd and Border collie rescue pages. Dogs of both breeds tend to end up in rescue situations when they are between one and five years old, most often between one and three—that's when people who thought they were SO cute as puppies or had a romantic idea of what living with a herding dog would be like hit the wall of reality and acknowledge that they don't have time to make sure the dogs have WORK to do.

Early this summer, I noticed that the Aussies were being adopted out pretty quickly but there were a whole lot of Border collies needing homes. I downloaded an application from Western Border Collie Rescue, but didn't do anything with it. I just contemplated the possibilities, while acknowledging the relatively irrational choice to take on responsibility for another being right now.

Then I started filling it out, just to see what kinds of questions were asked and how we might answer them. I talked over the possibility of a new dog with my daughter. We both think Tussah needs a canine companion, although, of course, primary responsibility will be ours. My daughter added her perspective to the forms.

Eleven single-spaced pages later, we thought we just might mail the application. I'd put on the form that we wouldn't be able to consider taking a dog until the fall, because of my travel commitments. I knew the approval process would take time. Sent first class, the application took a month to travel from Colorado to Wyoming. I wasn't thinking about it, because of all those work and travel engagements.

Our packet did finally arrive at the rescue organization. They started checking our personal references; that took a couple of weeks. Just over a week ago we enjoyed the required home visit—a Border collie aficionado and one of her lovely dogs came over to talk about pups! The various checks include people and animals in the family, type of household (physical set-up and routines), and (very important) state of yard and fences. The goal is to have the placements for these dogs be their permanent, perfect homes. Our home visit coordinator told us not to expect final approval in less than a week to ten days, because the (all-volunteer) people doing the rescues had two big events to attend. (One was the Meeker Classic Sheepdog Trials.) So far, this whole endeavor had been progressing very deliberately (aided by the postal service) for about three months.

Following the home visit, though, our approval came through almost instantly and we found ourselves on the phone talking things over with a "matcher" (a person works on figuring out which specific dogs might be the best matches for a family). One of our top criteria was that the new dog must not bully or otherwise make life difficult for Tussah, our established dog (also a rescue), who is now, as far as we can tell, roughly 12 years old. Any addition to the family must enhance Tussah's life at least as much as ours. Tussah is kind of alarmed by puppies, so we have assured her all along we would not get her a puppy. Plus an older dog needs us more than the puppies do.

After a flurry of phone calls and e-mails, we set out on Sunday morning to meet a dog whose shelter name has been Pebbles. (The page in that link will probably move once her status changes from "available" to "success stories." [ADDED Thursday, 9/15: her page has moved to "adoption pending." It will move again later.] She's one year old and unusually mellow for a young Border collie. We were told that she got along well with other dogs and with cats (we might have a cat again in the foreseeable future).

We drove about 2.5 hours to the meeting. Mapquest and Yahoo seriously underestimated the time to drive to the meeting location, an error that I should have picked up on before we were actually driving but didn't. My daughter practiced texting on her phone to keep the rescue folks updated on our whereabouts as we got off the freeway to avoid miles-long traffic jams and accidents. We finally met Pebbles and her foster mom at a school yard.

And we took the little dog for a walk (and a ramble through the play equipment and along some stone walls), with Tussah nearby.

This young dog is spicy, but she's also wise and she and Tussah seemed to feel like they already knew each other. So we decided (gulp) to take this particular rescue home with us, and her foster mom went off to get some of the food she'd been eating and an adoption contract for us to sign. We hung out in the only shade around and got to know each other more.

The only trick in getting photos was that initially every time I wanted to take a picture, the little dog started running toward me.

Then she began getting used to us.

So we returned to her foster mom the flexi-lead the pup had arrived on (we always have extra leashes in the car), packed up her food, signed the contract, and headed toward home.

All this took longer than we'd predicted, so I had to give up the idea of using the ticket I had for a special musical presentation that afternoon. Instead, we stopped off in Denver and got some lunch at Whole Foods, where our new addition charmed passersby, and my daughter took a side trip to the independent store Twist and Shout to get a couple of CDs that were on her wish list; I stayed in the car with the dogs and knitted.

When we got home, we introduced the new pup to her new spaces, inside and out, and we took both dogs for the evening walk. Then we did what we do on many Sunday evenings: went, with dogs, to visit friends, have supper, and watch a DVD (the final episode of "Firefly," in this case . . . my second time, my daughter's third, and our friends' first). The young dog acted as if she'd always done this.

In a number of the new dog's behaviors, it is quite apparent that she's part of the same family tree as our Ariel, although in both looks and personality she's quite different.

For one thing, she's tiny: roughly 35–37 pounds. (Tussah is 43–45 pounds, and Ariel was about the same.)

We got home and I washed down one of our crates for her (while I was doing it, she settled herself into Tussah's crate a couple of times), put in a pad, and showed her where she could sleep. She seemed ready. It had been a big day for all of us.

She'll get a crate like Tussah's for regular use in the house and this one will go back into the car, but for now we all know where we belong. It seems like she's always been here.

We just don't know what her "real" name is yet.

"Pebbles" is too soft to be a good call name, and Border collies need good call names: one or two syllables, not something that sounds like a command you'll want to be teaching, with some crisp-enough consonants to get attention. We're listing possibilities on a piece of paper on the bathroom mirror and are open to suggestions.

Our previous dogs have been:

• Farley (big, goofy dog; borrowed—the people who owned a house we rented left him with the house)
• Daisy (a miniature poodle, adopted at age 10 when our neighbors decided she had become senile; she was just lonely)
• Heather (Aslan's Mountain Heather, adopted at age 6 after her retirement from producing show puppies)
• Ariel (Tempest's Ariel Miranda, adopted at 7 weeks after being abandoned in December, with two siblings, in a field near Greeley, Colorado)
• Tussah (Tempest's Tussah Redfurr, adopted at about the age of 5 after having been abandoned at a reservoir in South Dakota, adopted out of our local humane society, and then re-homed to us after being picked up running loose in traffic quite a few times; her name in her previous home was "Red," which wasn't feminine enough for her)

"Tempest" is the "kennel" name for our rescues. (It became official with Ariel's AKC ILP registration.) We might like to incorporate the "pebbles" aspect of her history into the name, although we haven't set that as a requirement.

We also don't know what her "real" work is yet. She looks like a great candidate to be a therapy dog, and I suspect she'd like recreational (though perhaps not competitive) agility and rally. She doesn't have the drive to be a real competitor, but she obviously likes to work her brain and she's pleasantly bouncy without being hyperactive. We'll start with basic obedience, which she's already got the hang of.

So we'll all be getting to know each other for a while, although it feels like we've already been together for a long time.

UK Knit Camp

Here's a somewhat metaphoric treatment of my experiences at UK Knit Camp, held in Stirling, Scotland, during the second week in August. When I'm teaching, I go into it with all my attention, so I have no documentation of the six classes I taught, but one of the participants (who also helped me enormously with advance preparations) can prove that I was there (thanks many times over, J!). . . .

My schedule included the following classes and workshops:

•  Introduction to spinning on the handspindle
•  Introduction to spinning on the wheel
•  Introduction to spinning on whatever tool anybody shows up with
•  Rare-breed fibers (for spinners)
•  Breed-specific yarns (for knitters)
•  Rare-breed yarns (for knitters)

Because of the complications in getting the correct stamps on the appropriate paperwork to allow the U.S. instructors to teach (we heard that last-minute paperwork glitches are a common occurrence for artistic and cultural events) and the resulting shift in class timing, I taught the final two groups simultaneously (and fortunately in the same room). This was an interesting challenge, made possible through some swift re-apportioning of materials and the kind flexibility of the attendees.

Most of the fibers and yarns were generously provided by Sue Blacker of Blacker Designs. It's a testament to the quality of Sue's products that after the workshops the participants who had been working with these materials made beelines for her booth in the marketplace and bought much of the stock she'd brought with her.

So, moving to my visual metaphors. . . . The event was like a castle on a hill that we could see but initially had some trouble getting to:

(That's Stirling Castle, sitting high on its volcanic plug. The front-and-center structure in the compound, the Great Hall, has been coated in an ochre-colored limewash that the whole complex would have been dressed in at one time. From a distance, it glows.)

While the journey was fraught with detours and frustrations, the details offered many delights.

When we did get there, I found good companions and fine experiences:

I met many people, both other instructors and participants, with whom I would like to stay in touch over many years. The end result being sort of like this:

Mostly good, with some prickly bits to dodge around.

Because of the difficulties, the workshop I would have taught on Tuesday was rescheduled to Friday. I was disappointed that one participant couldn't make her calendar move around so she could join us at the altered time, and I was relieved that everyone else could make the necessary adjustments. It was a lot to have to adapt to, for everyone.

I may not remember ALL the breeds' fleeces and yarns we played with during the sessions, many provided by Sue Blacker (with supplements offered by generous participants and volunteers for the delight and edification of everyone present), but here's what I recall off the top of my head:

• Balwen*
• Bluefaced Leicester
• Black Welsh Mountain
• Border Leicester
• Castlemilk Moorit*
• Cotswold*
• Devon & Cornwall Longwool* (for the knitters, this one was handspun and carried in my luggage by me, because although I love this type of wool and wanted to show people what it's like, I knew it wasn't likely to be obtainable—without more effort than there was time to invest—in commercially prepared yarn)
• Galway
• Gotland
• Hebridean
• Herdwick(*)
• Jacob
• Manx Loaghtan*
• Norfolk Horn*
• North Ronaldsay*
• Portland*
• Ryeland
• Soay*
• Southdown
• Teeswater*
• Wensleydale*
• Whitefaced Woodland*
• Zwartbles

* Listed as rare by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. (*) Listed as geographically vulnerable by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.

To cover all this, we kept moving swiftly through the time we had together! There were just enough hours to give people an introduction to the array of possibilities. I love this stuff, and I had a wonderful time sharing it with the fantastic people who joined me on this adventure. . . .

None of the fleece samples came home with me; all the spinnable fiber was distributed to workshop participants. Because yardage on the yarns didn't come out evenly, I did have a number of ends-of-skeins left over, with which I'm going to be making demonstration swatches. Sorry they're in plastic; I'll post snapshots of the swatches as I make them up. Meanwhile, I'm rushing. . . .

Here's a final image about the event. There are still a number of loose ends to tie up in the administrative department. When they've been settled, the near view will dominate and the surrounding challenges will turn into a slightly out-of-focus backdrop.