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This was written in
2007
so is now very dated
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... our road doesn’t let us stand still and contemplate for long! 2006 had just begun when we got some news we had been hoping for.
Almost a year earlier we had approached Dover Publications (who specialise in reprints of old art/craft books) to ask if they would consider reprinting Woolly Thoughts. We weren’t optimistic as most of their books seem to be by authors who are no longer living. The original print run had been small but now books were changing hands for a great deal of money. We often wished that we had spare copies to sell.
I know that Meg Swansen, a publisher herself, was supporting us in encouraging them to reprint, and I suspect that Dover also consulted others about the sales potential.
Dover are not the best communicators in the world. We sent them the only copy we had and heard nothing for months. Eventually, we got an email asking if we could add a section bringing it into line with the current vogue for modular knitting. We thought this would be inappropriate as it would inevitably change the overall impression of the book.
Woolly Thoughts had been, and still is, at the heart of our thinking. We still passionately believe in all that it represents. I don’t think we could ever better it. Perhaps it is the M25 of our journey. We can wander away from it but its always there waiting to take us somewhere else.
It has been a very slow process (with absolutely no work from us, so far) but the reprint is now due for publication ‘in the second half of 2007’.
In the meantime, the book that was being packaged at the time we went to Italy finally saw the light of day in April. Somewhat confusingly, there were three versions, from different publishers, in UK, US and Australia. It was variously entitled Modular Knitting, No-
We sent off some photos of the toilet roll covers and an outline for a book to be called On a Roll. Our first port of call was Guild of Master Craftsman Publications, who had published Making Knitwear Fit and Creating Knitwear Designs many years earlier. They were immediately interested and asked us to go to a meeting with them. So we went, in February Half-
At the meeting we were told that it had been decided that the names of the toilet roll covers would be omitted from the book which seemed a shame as, in our opinion, there was then nothing to unite them. We were also told that the little people, which we thought were the most interesting of all the covers, would not be included. We were still happy that the book should go ahead as GMC had tentative plans to use the people elsewhere. A couple of months later there was an about-
There was just one new afghan in 2006 and I was rather surprised that there was even one. Ideas for large scale pieces seemed to have dried up and they were getting progressively more difficult to make but, out of the blue, came an email from a young US mathematician, about her ‘Perfect Shuffle’ scarves and the research she had done to create them.
A perfect shuffle is what happens when you split a pack of cards in half then shuffle them so that the cards mix alternately from the two piles. If this process is repeated often enough you get back to where you started. It was an idea I just had to represent on an afghan!
It caused problems we had met before because only a small number of colours could be used so that they were easily identifiable. Using a ten-
28a. 2006