The Knitting Tarot is a full, 78 card, knitter-conscious Tarot deck conceived and written by Amber Dorko Stopper and illustrated by Megan Leigh Dorko. It's growth, from the first card to the last, has been featured on these pages, and we still regularly feature single cards and accompanying text, as well as three-card readings using the Knitting Tarot.

The physical Knitting Tarot is now in progress as a letterpressed deck-and-book combination. For the most part, this page is dedicated to the documentation of that process.

If you are on our e-mail NOTIFY list (in the upper right hand corner of the Knitting Tarot's main page), you will be among the first in line to order. If you are not on the NOTIFY list, no amount of e-mailing, cajoling, or waving of cash will put you before the others on the list.

WE don't put you on the list; YOU put you on the list. If you're thinking you might want a Knitting Tarot deck-and-book set, go put your e-mail address into the NOTIFY list.

Silkscreened Knitting Tarot apparel, in the form of shirts and totes, was made available in 2004 and early 2005, and proved to be a good way for us to offset the costs of materials necessary for the deck-and-book set to be printed. We had time to do that kind of thing, then, before we started doing the letterpress work. We don't have time now.

We have a plan of offering one final silkscreened item for sale, but it will not be a shirt or a tote bag.

This means, in effect, that if you don't already HAVE a t-shirt or totebag featuring a KNITTING TAROT illustration, chances are you won't. All we are is dust in the wind, as the songwriter wrote.

Other items, equally fleeting -- ex libris bookplates, classroom-style Valentines, prints featuring card designs as they are printed on the press, signed and numbered by the illustrator -- have been produced, and are sometimes for sale on the store. They frequently do not last long, and even when we sell out, it doesn't make us want to make a bunch more of something we've already made just for the sake of selling them. We keep movin' on.

Sometimes, we don't even send out a NOTIFY e-mail for these items. (They call that a "soft sell".)

Keep your eyes on both the store and the in progress page, and chances are, you will not miss the opportunity to get things you might want to have.

The actual typesetting and printing for the Knitting Tarot was originally scheduled to get underway in January of 2005. We managed to start in on that work right on schedule! And we had originally hoped to have the deck-and-book available for purchase in the holiday season of 2005, and this was the optimistic mindset I was indeed in when I told VOGUE Knitting this very thing. But really, holiday season 2006 is a much more reasonable estimation.

Letterpress takes time. And we are new at it. And we are far from the best at it, although we do get a lot of practice these days, and we are getting better. There are a whole lot of more experienced letterpress shops out there -- but none of them came up with the KNITTING TAROT. This is a teaching project for us, and we are thankful for the opportunity -- but we are not going to churn them out to "capitalize" on recent "interest".

Not only was I optimistic in my original holiday season 2005 prediction for completing this project, I was masochistic in my prediction of planning to print 500. The actual number will be significantly smaller than that.

As always, the best way to find out exactly WHEN new news is in the making is to be on the NOTIFY list!

More than you'd pay at Borders for a deck, and less than ridiculous. That has been our official answer so far and we are sticking to it.

We want people to be able to have, and love, this piece. In December of 2004 we did a survey of random NOTIFY list members to ask them about their pricing expectations for the deck and book set. We have been working with those responses.

One expectation is that there will be two versions of the book and deck set: a "Standard" or basic version, and a "Deluxe" version. Mind you: the "Standard" version will STILL be handset and letterpressed, and, once again, isn't going to cost what a manufactured deck that you buy in a headshop is going to cost. We have a goal of keeping the "Standard" book-and-deck set below $100. It will cost less than the "Deluxe" version.

That being said, we do intend to make purchasers of the "Deluxe" version feel pampered, honored, and to even get a bit teary as to the tender magnificence of their Deluxicity.

Is that why you're sitting there knitting a pair of socks at seven stitches to the inch instead of buying a pair at Target?

WE aren't guaranteed WE'LL get one, so you aren't going to be either -- until you get an e-mail saying it's time to pre-order, and you put that pre-order through. That's quite a few months off.

If your question is really "How many deck-and-book sets will be printed?", the clear answer now exists: fewer than there are people on the NOTIFY list. Do we expect everyone on the list to remain interested in purchasing through 2005-6? No, we do not. Do we expect new people to keep finding the KNITTING TAROT page and signing up for the NOTIFY list? Yes, we do. And for some people, interest and budget will be better matched to smaller items such as prints, notecards, bookplates, or the like.

Our goal is to match the number of book-and-deck sets available with the exact number of people who will appreciate them the most, and love them for years to come. If you are one of those folks, all you need to do is keep your eyes open to the KNITTING TAROT page and NOTIFY e-mails, and you will be fine.

There are two parts of the Knitting Tarot webpages that will update regularly. The first is the Knitting Tarot In Progress blog, which will update whenever something new is happening.

Sometimes it will be worth taking a picture of, like letterpress cuts that have just come back from the engravers, or a proof of a card, or a sample of type, or a picture of Ben asleep on the couch. Sometimes it will just be information. Sometimes it will be a notification that items such as prints, notecards, or bookplates are available for sale.

The second thing that will update regularly is "Ask The Knitting Tarot". This "column" provides three-card readings with the Knitting Tarot, answering knitters' puzzlements while showing off a few cards from the deck. There will be a "featured" reading on the Knitting Tarot's main page, and the readings will also archive. The text for these three-card spreads will be special text written specifically for these aggregate readings, with excerpts from the actual text of each card as it will appear featured in the book, in bold.

Sometimes, instead of a three-card spread, we will feature a single card from the deck, along with the full accompanying text. There are people on our NOTIFY list who have been with us from card one. There are others who only found out and signed up after the last card had been designed. We want everyone to get a feel for the deck and text! Always feel free to e-mail and ask to see a specific card and text -- we'll put it on our list to feature!

People on the NOTIFY list will often receive e-mail notifications when these pages are updated, but not always. Best thing to do is check the pages as regularly as you might another -- rather slow -- blog.

Hopefully, this will keep us all wise, excited, and motivated through the completion of the book and deck set!

For more of Megan's work, visit her current notsoswift.com hosted page, Bellagraphic, or buy her wares at Anezka Handmade.

And you can always go to Amber's knitting blog where there is usually a lot more than just knitting and letterpress going on. There's veiled threats and accusations, too! (But not against you.)

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND ALWAYS FEEL FREE TO DROP AN E MAIL! we are theknittingtarot at gmail dot com, and we welcome your words!