The Independent Stitch

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.

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.

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.

Garden update, plus a bit on fiber (more to come)

Wow, it's been busy around here.

Book progress

The art director did a few days' worth of photos before I arrived to share the work. She did the pictures of the items made with various types of fibers. They're standard shots that don't include really technical fiber stuff.

Then I was there for five days of photography that turned into seven (I delayed my return home) and we finished all the wool shots.

I'll be going back for either four or five days, which should let us complete the photography for the other critters' fibers and the chapter openers and maybe the cover. Hopefully the cover. We did some preliminary cover photography at the very end of the wool days, but the final stuff is yet to come.

When I have a minute, I want to get some snapshots of the fiber-shoot posted.

Today, however, I spent arranging travel. Two more trips.

This just in

A few days after we get done with the next photo shoot, I'm flying to Cleveland for a little over 24 hours to tape two segments for next season's Knitting Daily TV. It'll be part of series 600 (series 500 is now airing and series 400 is available on the web, and there are DVDs of the other series).

That's a lot more travel to coordinate. I thought I was home for a bit. . . .

Meanwhile, the garden

Between bouts of booking flights and rental cars and arranging places to stay, I have been enjoying our garden.

Here's what it looked like in mid-May (on my mother's birthday, in fact):

By July 11, this is what we had:

Note the new squirrel-proofing on that one bed. The other beds seem to have been far less attractive to the critters this year. We did protect the plants vigilantly until they got reasonably large.

By July 27, just before I left for the LOOOOOOONG trip, here's what we had:

I arrived home to find this, on August 31:

What's not evident from the photos is how much we've actually been eating from that greenery. We were having lettuce before I left, and that was it. Now we have delicious tomatoes (thank you, Susan and Richard!), HUGE squash, and basil (thank you again, S&R!).

Lots of basil:

So I spent part of today (between travel-agent tasks) making pesto.

That's eight half-cup containers (four full cups) of pesto.

Yum.

Flamingos, goats, planning for photo shoots, and musk oxen in need

Life continues to be focused (completing The Project), to the point that it feels surreal. So yesterday morning when we discovered, while walking the dog, that a neighbor's lawn had been flamingoed, the vision seemed nearly normal:

We couldn't tell what the occasion was, although the "lead flamingo," nearest the door, had a card tied to its neck and when we took our afternoon dog walk an extraordinary number of cars were parked along both sides of the street near the same house. I've known about the flamingo phenomenon, but never seen it in action. Apparently a normal delivery involves forty flamingos. In this modest neighborhood, a mini-flock of eleven made an adequate impression.

On The Project front, I believe I will be finished with the goats later this morning. Then we'll bike to my cousin's for a gathering that will include two cousins, their two husbands, my 87-year-old aunt (88 in June!), my daughter, and me.

In addition to working with goats this week, I've been engaging in a series of e-mails with The Project's editor in which we are planning photo styling. The design launch meeting occurred at the publisher about ten days ago, so the art folks are also involved. I've known since we began The Project that the photo shoot, or shoots, will be extensive. When we're in the studio, we will need to be extremely well organized and efficient. I've put a lot of systems in place to facilitate that. Now we're getting close to deciding what to shoot, where, and how. The decisions involve both aesthetic and practical matters.

The editor asked me to send several sets of the locks and spun samples for the art director to use to shoot preliminary photos. These images won't be in the final book, but they will help her conceptualize the layout and help us all plan the week to week-and-a-half of actual shooting. (There is, of course, a book involved as part of The Project, but the manuscript part of this effort feels like just the tip of an iceberg.) So I sent off the Down breeds, seven "sets" of samples in two FedEx boxes (one large and one medium). I was relieved to hear that they'd arrived.

The Down breeds are, however, relatively simple to present. As our discussion by e-mail has evolved, I've also sent snapshots that display concepts required for other fibers, ideas pertaining to tactile qualities that we'll need to convey through the printed page. The big questions involve how.

I'd previously sent the overall concepts that the book wants to be about visually: diversity (of types of fibers) and transformation (from raw material to yarn). (The book will focus on the fibers themselves and on the yarns that can be made from them, not on spinning techniques or finished objects, although those will be hinted at.) A number of ideas that apply to multiple different fibers will be represented by demonstrations involving one fiber. It's like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle.

Here are some of the "talking point" photos I've snapped and sent off as part of the long-distance discussion.

A typical sample set, very basic:

That's Rouge de l'Ouest: raw locks, clean locks, and two sample skeinlets.

Next, a set showing texture possibilities with one fiber type . . . not all the possibilities, which are infinite, but enough to hint at what can be done. The various people involved in making this book happen need to mumble among ourselves about how best to show whatever can be conveyed in photos. These are all adult mohair. If we show skeinlets, then I would skip the two finest skeins (second and third from the right), because there's not much useful information conveyed by those two at this scale.

However, if we show strands of yarn, rather than skeins, then those samples do offer useful information:

(I've since added more plying twist to the finest white sample; most of the yarns I'm making are more loosely spun than usual in both singles and plying, because they need to showcase the fiber qualities in a photo, not perform well after years of wear in a textile. The project I am spinning for is the printed page, not a sweater or blanket or rug. And I'm spinning very, very fast, with no pauses and few opportunities to improve on my first attempt. Although I've marked some skeinlets to go back to and try for again, if I get the mass of work done in time.)

What the skeinlets offer, over the strands, is an opportunity to hint at the yarns' (and fibers') handling qualities, including drape:

Left to right: cashmere (a distinctive bulkiness, despite its fineness, and a supple quality), pygora type B (drape and luster . . . that's some of the combed-out pygora hair peeking in at the top . . . usually discarded, but interesting in a whole different way), adult mohair (body and luster), and plain standard goat hair (essentially no drape at all).

Here's a color set:

Those are cashmeres. They come from different parts of the world and have different fiber descriptions in qualities other than color—for example, length, diameter, and luster—which we may or may not be able to convey photographically, given our time and space constraints. This is an overview, not a focused study on each fiber.

For fibers that are grown in several (or many) colors, we're trying to at least hint at the variety. One of my dreams has been to include a complete rainbow of the defined Shetland colors, although I'm still missing samples of three of them . . . light gray, mioget, and dark brown have been elusive. While the Shetland breed itself is not currently endangered, the colored sheep make up quite a small percentage of the world population and we could lose them.

Speaking of losing resources, one of my motivations for The Project is an awareness of how vulnerable the living animals are to extinction. They are the providers of these amazing materials that we work with. Some breeds that existed when previous books on fibers were prepared (not all that long ago) appear to have vanished: we can't find them. Anywhere.

Yesterday I learned that the nonprofit research Musk Ox Farm in Alaska needs help (and therefore so do the musk oxen). There are two primary sources of musk ox fiber for textile folk: living animals in Alaska, and hunted animals in Canada. The living population in Alaska is also a primary resource for research on the animals' biology, research that is likely to be critical to these animals' survival in an environment that is being affected by climate change. These critters have been around since the Pleistocene—so for at least 12,000 years—and were hunted to extinction in Alaska in the late nineteenth century. The donation page contains buttons for set amounts, but there is also a "U-pick" option for any amount, and any amount helps.

What if there were no qiviut? Or Lincoln Longwool? Or. . . .

If the animals that produce these fibers die out, people who don't know fibers won't realize what they've lost. If the only food you know has been served from a drive-through window in a styrofoam container, then you can't understand not having access to freshly grown vegetables or artisan cheeses. Fortunately for those of us who do know fibers, one of the best things we can do to ensure their continued presence on the planet, and in our lives, is use and enjoy them . . . and share them with others so they can understand.

While I was amused by the pink plastic flamingos, I am awestruck daily by what I continue to learn about natural fibers, especially those grown by animals: and I've been studying them for decades already.

And now I have an appointment with a goat.

That's colored kid mohair. Here, on top of it, are mostly yearling mohairs and a peek of another kid sample at the lower left.

It's magic: continually unfolding, everyday, in-my-hands magic.

Spring in Colorado

Two days ago, we were riding our bikes in light jackets. Yesterday afternoon, this started to happen:

We're so glad the trees hadn't started to leaf out or—harder on them—bloom: every leaf or blossom collects additional snow and increases the weight the trees need to stand up under. Evergreens have better shapes for shedding snow than deciduous trees do!

The fresh snow is beautiful. I can't see two of the three raised garden beds in the back yard because they're completely covered, without even a ripple in the white to suggest where they might be. The third, taller one just peeks one corner out of the white.

My daughter shoveled last night when we had just a few inches of accumulation. Nonetheless:

Mid-morning on Monday, I got an e-mail telling me that The Project's photo/illustration list will be needed "soon." When I asked, "When is 'soon'?" the answer was "before a meeting on Thursday morning."

So I quit working on tax prep (also due Thursday) and dedicated myself to inventing a photo/illustration list. I knew such a list would be needed and I've prepared these things before, so I wasn't completely unprepared, but I've also had a few other tasks on my to-do list (like finishing the samples that will be in the photos . . . no point taking photos if there's nothing to put in front of the camera). I crammed twenty hours of inventorying image requirements into two days and . . . produced a spreadsheet consisting of 424 lines and something like six columns. Some items will be combined in the final photos, but overall I think The Project is on track to be abundantly illustrated. I transmitted the file just before 9:30 last night. . . .

Now back to the tax prep. . . .

In odd moments of time, the Vivian sweater by Ysolda Teague is coming along rather quickly. I don't usually knit at this gauge (4.25/inch), so it's surprising how fast the stitches add up. I'm not a speed-demon knitter (more steady than quick), yet I've finished one sleeve, am close to the top on the other, and have set up the patterns for the body, which is knitted in one piece . . . I would have modified the pattern for one-piece construction if it hadn't been written that way.

The hardest part of working this design so far is that it's written for ten sizes (many strings of numbers in parentheses) and involves a lot of different cable panels, with shaping worked around those panels. Instead of picking my way through the line-by-line instructions, which I deemed crazy-making (nearly impossible to decipher on the fly), I spent part of Sunday afternoon making the body plan visual and connecting the components to each other:

Whew.

I may have an opportunity to knit a few more rows today. AFTER I complete my 2009 mileage records, order a new print run of Knitting in the Old Way, work with tech support on a bug in a piece of tax-prep-necessary software, and spin a fiber set or two for that photo list . . . because the photo shoot itself will be coming up (at a so-far-undetermined time) and I won't be able to slam-dunk the remaining samples in two days, even if I have to!

Here's what one of the simple fiber sets looks like when it's finished:

Yes, that's wool. It's Rough Fell, which I get a huge kick out of. One of the ways it's used is to stuff mattresses, because it doesn't felt. It's really fun to spin. Basketry? Rug?

Here's one of the more complex sets, not quite complete:

It's Romeldale, and Romeldale has been traditionally all-white (except for the CVM, or California Variegated Mutant, branch of the family). Romeldales are now being bred for color, but the Romeldale can't be considered finished until there's a white sample in there.

While going through the photo list, I found a few gaps like that (no white Romeldale), which we missed noticing earlier because we've been working too fast. I also discovered that while we'd written up Gotland, that piece of text hadn't gotten into the finished manuscript that was sent to the publisher. I located it in the archives and sent it last night. Never a dull moment around here.

I haven't counted how many sample sets I have left to do. That's not information it would be helpful for me to know. I'd end up stopped in my tracks, staring at a wall with a big sign on it saying this whole endeavor is impossible. Here are the useful, productive thoughts: I can only work on one thing at a time, and I need to keep moving.

Maybe it's good we're sort of snowed in.

Although with The Project's current state, I feel greater-than-usual sympathy for those trees. I'll bet they feel like their limbs could use a massage, too.

Later. The snow will melt. Spring will come back. The Project will get done, whether I'm ready or not.

I'm practicing being shaped like an evergreen, able to drop burdens easily when the time comes, and to bounce back into shape.

Where most of the work gets done

I've written about the wonderful places to which I've traveled within the past year to work on the major project that is nearing its deadline (I'm not saying "completion": it will be pulled out of my hands, far from complete, because otherwise it will not be ready for a few decades).

I spent most of a week in a rented cabin shared with other writer friends.

Another set of friends helped me obtain the delight of a full week's residency.

And I retreated for a too-short weekend with co-author Carol Ekarius.

(That's me with Tuf, one of Carol's dogs. Carol took the picture.)

Yet I haven't shown where most of the work is getting done. That's partly because I'm embarrassed. It's organized, but it also looks like, as we used to say, "ten pounds in a five-pound bag."

I've worked in this office for many years—I think it's at least fourteen or fifteen:

For the final four or five years that I edited Spin-Off magazine, most of that work was accomplished in this space. Now this is where I do all the work on the books published by Nomad Press and for my freelance editorial clients. It's compact, but I have a window (the high, basement kind, just out of sight), and the tools I need are close at hand (an understatement). I do go off to a coffeeshop or the library several times a week, taking a single set of tasks with me. It's refreshing.

The photo above was taken during the time when the computers were breaking down, and just before Jessica Derksen, who has been an enormous help in my continuing efforts to accomplish the impossible, showed me how to fit yet another major job (The Project) into my office. It was April 2008. I'd signed the contract for this work four months earlier. Already 14 boxes of fiber were in the dining room (because there was no room for them in the office), and it was obvious that many more boxes would be part of this undertaking before it was done.

There was a storeroom adjacent to the office, separated from it by a wall. When we bought the house, this space was called a bedroom. We learned later that technically it shouldn't have been listed as a bedroom because there's no closet (there was also no closet in the formerly so-called bedroom that is now the office, although we have since built one).

The only access to this room was through the laundry area. This space has a nicer window than the office does. And a heat vent. The office doesn't have a heat vent.

Jessica got the idea of taking down the wall between the two rooms. The primary reason for this was so we could use the small hallway/entry between the laundry area and the storeroom to stash boxes of fiber. It was only about 10 square feet, but that can look like a lot if you are tripping over boxes. If we took down the wall, we could fill that entry space with boxes because we could walk into the storeroom through my office. The change was kindly, quickly, and neatly implemented by Jessica's husband, Jonathan.

I did lose a floor-to-ceiling wall of bookcases, shown here when I'd almost completely dismantled them:

I still haven't found permanent, orderly homes for everything that was displaced. However, these lines on the wall are the start of a big change.

And the wall came down:

Here's the view of the office from the former storeroom:

And the former storeroom as seen from the office:

Most of the work on The Project now takes place in that former storeroom, which, a year and a half later, looks like this:

You can't see all the active boxes in that picture. There are now 54 (if you don't count the ones that contain the extra bits that are not directly part of the book), so in addition to what's here there are more in the laundry room, in that entry/hallway this exercise freed up (which you can see a bit of between the bookcases in the photo above and, from the other side of the opening, below), and in the downstairs bathroom (as seen from the laundry area in the photo below):

I can't get a photo angle that shows the boxes on top of the dryer.

We're not done yet. There will be more boxes, and I'll need to figure out what to do with them. There's still space for about 3 on top of that pile in the bathroom.

It's been nice to pack 12 boxes (the number that will fit) into the car, along with the tools and the computer, and to go elsewhere. It's easier to focus when everything is neatly organized and I'm not having to juggle all the other responsibilities of these spaces and of the house, although I can only withdraw from the other dimensions of my life for a few days at a time.

Yet day in and day out, week, month, and year in and year out, most of the work gets done right here. The trips away have been real boosts to my progress: I'm amazed at what can get done with the support of those protected times and places. Yet plodding along in the middle of everything is also part of the whole package, and without it the job as a whole would be unreachable. 

I'm constantly grateful for Jessica's idea to tear down a wall, for my willingness to say yes, and for Jonathan's help in getting the restructuring job done so I could move forward.

Saturwoolday

It's shaping up to be a fine day. One of the things I love about wool is its variety, and what's going into the tub today represents quite a range:

There's Castlemilk Moorit, a very rare breed closely related to Shetlands. The provider of this sample apologized for its second cuts (snippets caused by shearing with two passes) and scurf (I'll skip describing scurf at the moment . . . ), but it's a lovely color, with excellent staple length, and will be just fine when washed and processed:

There's Polwarth from the Falkland Islands . . . not all of the sheep from the Falklands are Polwarths, but a quantity worth noting are . . . fine, with really cool crimp (those wavy contours in, in this case, both individual fibers and locks):

And we finally, finally (thanks to the generosity of friends on a couple of continents) have some Herdwick, giving us an opportunity to consider things like kemp (coarse, dye-resistant fibers) and Mrs. Heelis:

And while the wools are soaking in the tub, with their 20-minute demands for attention and changes of cleansing and rinsing solutions, I have THIS to enjoy:

It's Clara Parkes' new The Knitter's Book of Wool. Just arrived. I've glanced. I love Clara's take on the world, and am so glad she wrote this book.

It's shown on some Suffolk fleece I have here . . . I pulled out a lock at the lower right corner of the book, because it's so nice and long for a Suffolk. In the background is a rug I wove many years ago from Pendleton mill ends. I have a lot of rugs made with those mill ends, picked up at a weaving place in Poulsbo, Washington, long, long ago. They are still trucking. Our older dog "digs" in this one every night, making herself a nest to sleep in.

Snowing out. A good day for enjoying a variety of wools in a variety of ways.

If I get the washing done in time, I might even get to spin or knit some.