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the only thing we are waiting on now is the dust jackets, which will arrive early next week.
the edition is being numbered, and some books signed. the decks are wrapped in beautiful japanese kyoseishi paper -- translated as "strengthened paper", it has a very fabriclike finish, and is very strong and does not "ding" when folded.
the kyoseishi is red, while our endpapers are french blue and our dust jackets are a rather monk's-robe saffron.
we will be ready to take orders within three weeks.
on july 19, we put twelve boxes into our car -- a signature in each box -- and hit the road for hoster bindery in ivyland.
all the pages were folded in a machine, and then we returned to the bindery on july 24, to collate the books by hand.
dies are being made for the stamping on the books' spines, and for some blind embossing on the front of the cloth cover. stay tuned for more!
with fewer than a hundred prints left to make -- just a few hours' work -- ben's biggest worry is that i will rush ahead and finish before he gets home.
not a chance babe.
i'll save him a few, and we expect to make an early evening of it (with, i hear, some relief from this oppressive heat today as well.)
we will take a few weeks off here before moving into our post-production reporting (which is bound to have interesting binding-equiptment photos).
our dinner reservation at le bec-fin has been made...
we did it.
the makeready for this second-to-last form is taking a bit longer than usual, as it is really a big page full of text, more than you'd normally see in just one of the card texts, and requires much tweaking. however, once it gets going, we are really in the home stretch of home stretches -- the LAST form is all of four lines long, and will go very quickly.
we can conservatively say that there should be no problem having the KNITTING TAROT book-and-deck set available for sale this early autumn (in the next three to four months).
and today, i would like to get somewhat mushy and talk about YOU.
i can't even tell you people what it has meant to ben and megan and me to see the support for this little project. there are more than 600 of you on the KT NOTIFY list. granted, it is my wry and realistic belief that quite a few of those names have moved on... to new e-mail addresses, and possibly away from knitting entirely. this project really came into bud at the height of all that knit-bloggerdom and nine hundred chicken-soup-for-the-knitter's soul books coming out every year. it is perfectly reasonable for us to assume that the bandwagoneers have moved on, in some cases.
but there are some of you who have been excited at every turn about every little thing we did. t-shirts, totes, mugs -- you were there. thank GOD, there were plenty of you who were NOT confused and, after i had said there would be no screenprinted schwag, actually UNDERSTOOD that we were not going back on our word on that when we offered limited edition letterpress prints and bookplates. (YES. screenprinting and letterpress are two VERY DIFFERENT THINGS! thank you for getting it!)
we are always happy -- well, not happy, because sometimes the messages have been downright frantic -- when strangers e-mail us out of the blue worried that they have "missed" their chance to acquire the book-and-deck set. nobody has missed that chance yet. it makes us feel great that you care.
but i think some of you may have guessed already that i would have gone through with this entire project if NONE of you had ever signed up on the NOTIFY list. and, that if we sell five sets entirely, it'll be a bit of a storage problem, but won't make us feel as though we have done wrong, or "invested" these years and dollars into a project that is no good. we know what this project is: gorgeous. special. utterly one-of-a-kind. and, in these days of books with titles like teenagers who knit and the chihuahuas who love them -- we are proud that the KT is content-strong, original as hell, oh, and did we mention, PRINTED ENTIRELY BY HAND?
we could have shopped it. hell, it might have worked. we could have gotten a contract. we could have gone on book tour. we could have self-published through traditional methods. we didn't do that either. we set every letter. we hand-cut every sheet that went into our press. we spent long boring hours sorting out the duds and knowing that, even so, our work wasn't "perfect". it was, and is, potato-print blotchy in spots. we love it. we are proud.
and you supported the effort.
as much as i hope we sell every single copy that we have to sell -- and sell them to the people who have waited for them, and will really appreciate them -- there's a bigger message i'd like to send. please, do not misread my gratitude for your "support" of the project as me saying "show the world how special YOU are by buying the work that i made." or, "let's show those people who think knitters are namby-pambies that we're really spiritually advanced thinkers by purchasing MY work." of course i want people to purchase the set. i want the right 170 people out there to get them -- not the people who need every new knitting book and scrap of schwag that comes out on the market so they can blog it and then throw it on the pile. not every tarot deck collector who has decks falling off their shelves that they never even use. i want it to be loved and appreciated by every one who buys a set. i want that very much.
but the bigger message here -- that i'd like to get out to more than 170 people -- is whatever it is you want to do, no matter how crazy and unguaranteed for success it sounds -- if you really love the idea, and are really committed, it will be worth it, whether anyone else in the world thinks it will be or not. i didn't have to wait for the approbation of some publisher or some market research to make the KNITTING TAROT. i needed my family, and some ideas, and some hunks of metal and ink. i didn't want to make a career, or an identity, out of one project -- but i did know i would have to, effectively, spend -- think about that word, spend -- a lot of time and energy.
working for the small audience takes belief in what you are doing -- with no money coming in, with no contract, with no "media contacts" (although, yes, thank you vogue knitting for your little blurb in 2005 -- it made our week!) to speak of.
if there's ANYTHING i'd like to come away from this project sure of, it's not so much the recouping of expenses as it is the belief that more "little" projects -- like the KNITTING TAROT -- find their way into the world. and, even more than that, even if those projects never crossed my line of vision -- i'd like to believe that there were more of you -- creative, excited, dedicated -- taking leaps like this. i can't begin to describe what it's like, the freedom and the slavery of it, but it sure beats anything else i could have done with my mid-thirties. i promise you that.
we thank you for caring, and for following along. we understand how "a tarot deck for knitters" can sound ridiculous to many -- but so perfect, and exciting, and just-the-thing-you-were-missing, to others. whichever you believe, you are right. and for those of you who think it was a wonderful idea, we truly feel the best gift we can give any of you is the finished product we are on the cusp of holding in our hands (and that we hope you will soon be holding in yours).
so... the type for the entire book has now been set.
up until a few days ago i'd have been happy to simply say, "i've typeset an entire book!" -- but, as a killjoy friend pointed out to me, i haven't been able to typeset an entire book, as another friend has been insisting for some time that she wanted to come over and "help" set the type. this week was her last opportunity, and she came over to get her hands in.
literally everyone else who has ever come over to "help" with the KT has fallen into a paralytic slump of boredom the minute ben or i have started to show them what it's all about. they grope hastily for dog or cats, petting them non-stop, getting as hair-covered as possible, to avoid the repetition and dullness of letterpress work. but, as you can see from the picture above (and some of you, at least a few of you, know me enough to know those can't possibly be MY hands, with the red nail polish), i have in fact typeset an entire book minus one line, because, indeed, this friend set that line. it's the first line of the second-to-last paragraph of the introduction to the book, i believe.
the form that is being printed now is the very last card-and-text combo (and again, is a mismatch -- it's the magician card and title, and the chariot/blocking text.) that's IT for the cards -- the next two forms are the introduction to the book. it's all set to go.
whoops! got a little behind there with the countdowning.
today's post is long overdue -- a tribute to the great unsung hero of the KNITTING TAROT, who i think has put more time and energy into this project than even i have. he is the most uncomplaining, enthusiastic person i know, and the ONLY person i know who can come home from working nine hours at a high-profile, high-energy job and say, "i'm looking forward to printing tonight!"
he is my gorgeous husband. for those of you reading this list who know ben, rest assured that i know how much you love him too, and that i never get tired of hearing you saying how handsome and sweet and great he is, and rest assured that i know how lucky, lucky, lucky i am.
ben built the skeleton for this book. he has done at least half of the printing and all of the makeready, and all of the cutting. he was tireless in his research of materials like paperstocks, and in finding binding services for us. he is, in a word, amazing.
ben does not knit, and the only tarot readings he's ever gotten have been from me. (see him above, also completely smothered in my knitting.) but he has learned a lot about letterpress in these last few years. this is a man that did not bat an eye when i said, "how about we buy a printing press?" and he continues to refer to me as a "cheap date".
when we are finished printing, more than anything, i look forward to seeing ben looking around the house for Something To Do... for the first time in four years.
he is the best.
today i have mad propz for mari who e-mailed with a response about the official KT card layout, which has been up, people, for literally over a year and nobody before mari got it. says mari:"It's a cast-on, of course--the beginning foundation that starts any project. Just follow the loop of the layout order--it kinda looks like a long-tail cast-on."
and she's right.
our holiday weekend was kinda wacky-busy, due not only to our continued work on the KT but due to the finishing up of another project, of which i am too proud not to mention here -- the third installment in the NOSHI series, The Punk Rock Knitting Swindle. i am really, really happy with how this evolved. please check it out!
there's a LOT of dirty type to clean this week, so i'll be watching crappy movies on my laptop while i clean... dig it!!
i have come to really love the analogy from a few posts back, about how the end of this part of the project feels like the end of a school year.
it's convenient that it's happening at the same time in the calendar (although i will have to pretend that our school year reaches a little further into june than usual, as though we have had too many snow days and need to make them up.) but there is that same sense of a gradual lightening of the burden. things in the printing room are starting to look more spare, as more things get put away for the last time. every step we take is a bigger fraction of the whole than the last one we took (this is of course true all along, but now is much more noticable.) frankly, at this point, whether we have a rush-rush-rush attitude or decide to slow down, it won't make much of a difference.
i'm starting to recall, slowly, the things we used to do in the evenings, before this is what we did in the evenings (and, for me, what i do for some hours of the day.) ben and i used to say to each other after dinner, "what should we do now?" -- and then we'd have to decide. maybe we'd go grocery shopping. maybe we'd go for a drive. maybe to a bookstore.
on weekends, there were times we were actually bored and couldn't think of anything to do at all. it's been years since we felt like that.
people keep asking me what we're going to do to celebrate. we aren't really sure yet. it's unlikely that it will happen on the night when we print that final print, because that usually happens around nine-thirty at night. i don't even know that it'll be the next day that we celebrate. we aren't party people and it's entirely possible that we will feel more deflated than anything else, at least for a little while.
but we might go to le bec-fin for dinner. we've talked about it.
people also keep asking me if i'm looking forward to getting back to writing short stories. i'm well chuffed that anybody even remembered that i write short stories! and i am, really, looking forward to it.
today's picture is the boxes of the actual decks stacked on our church pew, as minor renovation work is being done in the area where they are normally stored, and we needed to move 'em out of the way for a few hours.
we are printing number EIGHT in our countdown these last few days, but printing - that is, putting ink to metal and metal to paper - is not the only part of the process. there are lots of other things we do - sort finished prints, set type, clean type, and cut paper - and sometimes we do those things in big batches, to "get ahead".
tonight, something really exciting is happening. ben is cutting the last - the last - of the paper we need to complete the books.
and yes, all of that cutting has been done in our kitchen. and yes, that is a box of all-bran, which we use to make muffins.
see this box? at one time, there were three of them stacked here in the printing room. and then we had to buy another one. but for over a year, there's been at least one on the floor, and as you see, it takes up quite a bit of space. (those grey boxes over to the left are filled, in fact, with finished book signatures. they take up space too.)
but tonight, the cutting will be finished and that means this box can be moved. to wherever we are going to keep it. as you see - it's still mostly full. which means it's still mostly heavy. about two hundred pounds, a little less now. we have a lot of extra paper.
we don't know where we're going to put it but the fact that we have the freedom to move it is really making us want to put it somewhere. i know ben is looking forward to it.
and, i'm probably speaking too soon (i hear the blade slicing through the air as i type), but he did also make it through this whole process with all of his fingers, bless him.
we are on the MOVE.
we are well into number nine in our countdown, which happens to be the image and card title for "the gauge swatch/justice" and the text for "binding off/death" (as you may remember, we print in signatures, so only an eighth of the time were we ever printing the card and text that were meant to be paired together.) it's exciting to know that all the pages we have left to do are either the book's front matter or cards from the major arcana, and therefore we were able to break down and put away the running heads for the minor arcana and court cards. all these little things add to the excitement... it really feels like the last week of school or something (although it will feel that way through june), when you turn your textbooks back in, and the bulletin boards start coming down, and all that stuff.
i do want to impart some important information about the project into the rest of these countdown posts. these countdown posts don't show much promise for being exciting image-wise; after all, we look pretty much the same doing the printing as you've seen before. (although a best of KNITTING TAROT set now exists on flickr, if you want to relive some of our watershed dates, and see just how far in the past some of those dates are!)
one topic i have touched on here and there as we have been working on the KT has been the topic of "deluxe" and "standard" editions. we had never come to a solid decision as to how those editions would differ, and a few months ago, we came to the conclusion that every decision we had made about the project - cardstock, text stock, ink, and materials - was the decision we had felt best suited the project. we didn't have any "deluxe"-ness in mind that we felt would work with the whole, and we didn't want to force it.
so the KT book-and-deck set will NOT be divided into "deluxe" and "standard" editions - it will be one, single, letterpressed edition only (and, as you all know, a very limited one.) each book and deck will be exactly the same as the others - no "deluxe" satin bookcovers, no gold leafing, no burst of lavender scent when you shuffle. we think this expresses our vision in the most true manner.
we do, however, have a few extras to offer folks who order early when we get the show on the road - and i will discuss those in a later post.
here is a complete KNITTING TAROT deck divided into two stacks. the stack on the left represents the pages of the KNITTING TAROT book that we have completed printing. the stack on the right represents what's yet to be printed.
this is why we're in a good, albeit nervous, mood.
we were talking last night and starting to add everything up in our minds. the HIGH number for what we will have to offer when this project is complete is 170 book-and-deck sets. we're going to the bindery with enough materials, with the throw-away rate, to hit that number, but if we run into any machinery trouble, it could be a little less.
ben said, last night, that in light of the kind of press we have (a "folio" press, meant to print broadsides, pamphlets, and small books), we are crazy to have printed such a large book on it. this is true - most people would have, considering the length of the book, wanted to print in quarto (four pages at a time) or octo (eight pages at a time). our press isn't big enough to do that. and so, yes, what we have done is kind of unusual.
still, what would we have done differently had we known how time consuming it would be? not a single thing.
and could we have made more? not without mortgaging away a portion of our lives that would have made it a lot less fun. neither of us wishes there were more of them... we'll have ours, some other people will have theirs.
i can honestly say it'll be quite some years before we do another project this size on the press, though, if ever again.
as tired as we are, now that we're in the final ten, we have some extra reverence for every step we take.
amazing progress is being made on this project.
the portion of the book featuring the court cards is completed. since we have been working out of order, there are only four more texts and images to complete the minor cards, as well. then, we will really just be focused on finishing the majors, and the front end of the book... and then that's it for printing.
did i really just say that?
this past week we celebrated the third anniversary of bringing the press home. in the year prior to that, i had written the text for the deck, and megan had done all the drawings. we are on the last eighteen forms of printing, and print an average of 1.4, sometimes 1.3, forms a week. you do the math.
there is only ONE huge box of paper left on the floor in our front room. only one. still too big a one to pick up and carry, and it will still be when we finish printing, because we're probably not even going to need half of it.
and it looks wonderful. i'm so happy. WE'RE so happy.
as i said in an earlier post, we'll count down the final ten forms as they happen.
how to create an iPod tarot deck. good thinking!
quite busy here - have officially passed the three-quarters mark on the bookwork. will begin official countdown at TEN forms to go (right now there are 24 left, but we finish more than one a week, although not quite two.)
when printing the book's pages is finished, the choosing of endpapers and book jacket papers will commence, as well as what i hope to be a series of adventurous posts (and photographs) of us at the bindery.
never been this close. it's kind of terrifying.
click to enlarge each print!
for the '06 holiday season (THIS one!) we will be offering the VERY last item for sale before the book-and-deck set is available next year (expected for early holiday '07 release!)
A SET OF FOUR SIGNED AND NUMBERED PRINTS featuring the illustration and text from each of the ACE cards in the KNITTING TAROT have been signed and numbered by both the artist and author. these are printed on very heavy art paper: rives BFK in grey (it is a different grey than the KT card deck.)
the prints measure approximately 10 by 14.25" - they are bigger than the scanner bed so there is a good bit more margin to the left of each illustration than you are seeing here. all handset type, all handprinted, these are the same illustrations and texts that will be featured in the book-and-deck set when it is available next year!
these prints will be sold ONLY as sets of four. (no singles). there are only TWELVE sets available for purchase. since this is such a limited edition, we will NOT be using the STORE for this opportunity. please e-mail us at theknittingtarot at gmail dot com if you are interested in purchasing these prints.
each set of four prints will cost $85, which includes US postage. (please e-mail us if you wish to purchase overseas.)
purchasing for these sets is first come, first served, PAYPAL only. E-MAIL us NOW you are interested. or, make sure that gift-giver in your life has this link!
in addition to the KT and her always-anticipated halloween card, megan does a lot of health and wellness-related graphic design. she has recently been inspired to contribute designs to berkeley student gideon sofer's campaign to create an official USPS postage stamp to increase awareness of IBD/Crohn's disease.
by which i mean: we are more than halfway through the bookwork!
i can't believe it myself. we have learned quite a few tricks in making it seem all a little less tedious (because, face it, things like cleaning type are tedious). you see to the left what my desk looks like these days. settling in for some cleaning and redistributing of type, i have on my laptop screen the opening scene of one of my favorite films, love is the devil: study for a portrait of francis bacon. watching a favorite movie is a great way to make typesetting move along quickly.
a local knitter lent me an interesting book this week: it is, indeed, a tarot book, written by, apparently, the barbara walker (she of the many stitch anthologies). how neat! i do not know if the book is still in print but i look forward to browsing it.
just a note: occasionally i receive an e mail from someone on the KT NOTIFY list saying they haven't gotten an e mail from that list in so long that they worry they've lost contact with it. since using the RSS feed on this blog, i don't post to that list UNLESS there's something in the store to sell (such as... the book and deck set). since we haven't done any store items in so long, i haven't sent an e mail to that list. i prefer it that way, as i'm sure most people do. but that list IS still the first place to hear when the KT is ready for sale, and the only thing i can conceivably see being posted to that list BEFORE then is the possible sale of a set of prints featuring all the aces (four prints, illustrations and text for each ace on each print.) that will happen this holiday season but will likely be the last thing available before the book-and-deck set.
so stay on the list if you're on it, but no, don't expect to see an e mail to that list whenever i post to this blog. for that, just subscribe with your blog reader to the RSS feed.
we hold these truths to be self evident:
you'll notice that we don't have a fixed number for the edition yet. i don't feel confident that we can know that until the thing is back from the bindery, and that's a good distance off. i've seen some letterpresswork where that number is printed right in; it would be mere bravado in our case and i don't dare chance it.
silence on this blog only ever means one thing: we're working hard. these last few days, we've been taking what might be our final easy patch when it comes to the bookwork - we are printing the ruled pages for the back of the book, which people can use to make notes about readings and cards (and knitting).
these forms require virtually no typesetting and that lets me get up to speed on cleaning, redistributing, and setting type - and it's nice to be a tad ahead on those jobs.
we have passed the one-third mark with the bookwork and expect to be at the halfway mark by the end of summer!
just another evening at KT central. this photo was taken a few minutes ago; ben is at the press, after our second pizza dinner of the week (it's one of those weeks).
all is as usual. except... what's that brightly colored light outside the front window?
oh. that would be the carnival they built outside our front door this weekend. for the next two weeks, we live on the very edge of a carnival. yes, there are even carnies living in the field! in tents and in trailers! i am swooning.
check the link above to see the slideshow of the carnival being built. most photos were taken from my front stoop. new photos added daily! we have not been to the carnival yet, but are going with a seven- and five-year old friend on friday night.
not that i don't think we'll go before then; heck, we could be there in the next thirty seconds. funnel cake, you know. lots of funnel cake.
ought to make printing more interesting, from now through the 25th of the month.
earlier this week we passed the 25% point in printing the bookwork. we celebrated with sushi and capogiro.
i seem to remember "celebrating" in some way when we were at something like five ninety-sixths of the way through the bookwork, too, but a quarter of the way sounds a whole lot better.
i've hit, in relatively recent years, a number of big bells in terms of huge, cinematically huge, feelings. feelings like so this is love! and oh my god, this is grief and i have got to get out of this marriage or i'm gonna die (that one's long solved.) and i'm finding that when it comes to printing the KNITTING TAROT, i'm hitting one of those really deep, almost indescribable feelings. it's incredibly satisfying work. i can't imagine how different a place the world would be - for art, for literature, for happiness - if everybody had a printing press. even a little clamshell table-top printing press. it would make people think so differently about those big glued-together piles of pulp one sees in the big bookstores - you know, the things with pages that they keep next to the picture frames and yoga mats and chocolate-covered espresso beans.
we seem to have solved our storage problems for the nonce, with the bookwork here. it'll get even easier come autumn, when we don't have to keep the pages in a regularly air-conditioned room. stuff is starting to stack up, and it's always sort of scary to think about it - and all the decks - just hanging around here, partway realized. i think it was JFK who called children "hostages to fate" - it's easy to feel that way about partially-completed letterpress work, too.
we're starting to fantasize about the binding process, and choosing endpapers, and how the endpapers for the deluxe editions might differ from the standard edition.
i can't believe this is all really happening.
our goal is to finish the actual printing of pages sometime before next march - to beat the yearbook rush at our bindery. (the hoster bindery does a lot of catalog work for museums, and a lot of private printings for rich folk, a la nineteenth century, but they also do yearbooks, and we intend to get the KT in ahead of the '07 rush.)
as time goes on i find there is something i really want to say about the creative process in general, and to suggest, or even set an example for others, that there are ways other than the ways that people generally set forth as linear "career" paths to "success". i've gone on about this on my knitting blog and i've certainly discussed it where writing is concerned and maybe i've even let it leak out a bit here. it's been something i've been thinking about a lot this week, in the sense of having experienced "good press" for a piece of fiction i wrote made me feel, even though it was positive, rather icky. i found this hard to put a finger on until another artist friend cleared it up for me beautifully - that sense of criticism of ANY kind being reductive. the creative process is already reductive, distilling. when somebody else gives you that stamp of approval or disapproval, it's easy in either case to feel a quick "how dare you."
more and more i think about how downright shitty my life would be if i had followed the paths set forth at the age of twenty - when innocence could actually make me say, with a straight face, well, what's wrong with trying to write a novel, even though i don't wanna write a novel, if a published novel will help me sell a much-harder-to-market short story collection? it's what my agent says i should do. how bad could it be?
i don't give myself a hard time for having that kind of innocence, and no one should for themselves, either. everyone has a right to find their way and change their plan without vilifying their former belief systems, or even worse, their own youth. i wasn't one of those people who felt i had to "make good" for the parents because they had put me through college, so i had to get some "use" out of that english/creative writing MFA before i did "what i really wanted". at some point, the widespread assumption of the "ladder" of writing success began to chafe, and all i had to do was look at writers five to ten years older than myself who had "made it" to realize the world didn't need another one of them - and if it did, they weren't getting it out of me.
how the hell does this get one to her mid-thirties and setting lead type for the book to accompany a TAROT DECK about KNITTING? i guess in the same way that, if put in a room without clocks and windows, a person would find their own sleeping and eating schedule that would not match up in the slightest to the three-squares-a-day, eight-hours-at-night schedule that most of america practices. my world is not without windows or clocks, so i don't really know exactly how it happened, but i do know what the projects for the next few years, even after the KT is finished, will be - and that's with, and without the press. i still work on fiction regularly but without a schedule. publishing it, i find, feels better to me if it's rather few and far between (although i keep telling myself i should get a little more out there). that is precious precious stuff. and i guess i'm turning into a garden-variety weirdo in that i spend so much time and heart on it and i'm so steadily losing interest in having it read by the world at large. but it's nice to have it read by somebody. well, some somebody's are better than others, when it comes down to the joy of talking about it later, if there is any to be had. so, knowing that, how many copies of anything need to be in the first place? and, in a market that is so riddled with corruption, fakery and logrolling, why wouldn't i feel better setting every letter by hand, and printing every page?
that's a rhetorical question. i really don't know the answer. what i know is the deep, moving satisfaction the KT is giving me these days, and that with just a little less than a year of printing to go (with the current numbers, from which we need to pare a little time), i am already lamenting its completion.
because we are printing the book in signatures, there's always one text and one illustration in the bed -- but only a fraction of the time do they correspond to one another.
however, it only takes a little time to get out the image and title that do go with a text, and to make a print that features both the card image and title, and the text that it illustrates!
and then, it takes a little more time to make those prints.
it'd take even more time to put those prints up on the store to sell. that's where we draw the line right now. so these prints -- so far we've only done THE EMPRESS and THE MAGICIAN and don't really know how many others we'll do -- aren't going up for sale any time soon. possibly not until the books and decks are ready to sell. (for those buying the DELUXE EDITION, a print will be included in your package, signed and numbered.)
i know i want to do all four aces like this, with the texts. i am not sure what else. none of the courts, though, since we already did those prints (see picture) last year. those of you who have them are lucky -- we're not doing anything else like them again! i took mine out today and was glad that i had kept some!
best metaphor that the KT has given me yet (this happened more than a week ago but just kind of crystallized itself in my head more recently):
i was entering the forms we had printed in the spreadsheet and said to ben, "well, we're finally at a nice round fraction here - it doesn't sound like a lot, but we're ONE -SIXTH of the way through printing the book!"
and we were celebratory for about two seconds - until ben looked over at where we store the paper, and we noted that it was one-third gone.
in the last couple of weeks we've printed the first page that had an ace on it.
i seem to remember talking about this in a previous post: when i wrote the original book text for THE KNITTING TAROT, the aces had particularly long "secondary" titles. each of the secondary titles for the aces was "knitting for the sake of (fill in the blank)" - and each of these things one was knitting for the sake of in the aces was, in fact, the driving force behind the entire suit. for needles, creating; for skeins, expressing; for gauge, challenging; for spindles, serving.
this whole "knitting for the sake of" thing was, even in the scope of the longish secondary titles that other cards had, rather long to be on the cards themselves. i had decided before we started printing cards at all that the aces -- in card form -- would not have the secondary titles on them. these titles were, of course, important, and particularly in the minor cards; even in using traditional tarot, there's no cards anyone is more likely to have to "look up" when doing a reading than minors, and so it's nice, i think, to have the secondary titles to jog one's memory. in the case of the aces, i thought, the cards could do without those secondary titles -- even if they were hard to remember, there was no better place to try to force a little learning on practicioners than the aces. after all, they serve an entire suit.
in the book, i had intended to put the entire "knitting for the sake of" title. and then, when faced with actually doing it, i no longer liked the way that looked. so: a rewriting of each of these four secondary titles ensued. knit to create is now what the secondary title on the ace of needles reads, as you can see. and yes, this would have fit on the card.
why didn't i think of simply changing the titles back when we were printing the cards? i don't know - seems like an easy enough thing to have thought of. but i didn't, and still like the fact that there's no "cheat sheet" on the aces themselves. some things are just meant to be.
speaking of aces, that's how i'm feeling these days, particularly about this project. just shuffling through the deck or the printed pages of bookwork drives home one clear message: this is the biggest, coolest thing i've ever done with my time, my energy, my creativity. i'm simply so happy. granted, there have been days i've taken to my bed over this project. i have seen ben sit down on the floor in a near faint. we have yelled at each other. it's difficult, and it's far from perfect. but we're just so proud. we'll be so happy when the book-and-deck sets are available for others to purchase and enjoy, but the deeper we get into the process, the less it feels like a commercial venture. i mean, it was always rather limited in that capacity, of course.
spending a lot of time, energy and creativity doing things that are limited in their commercial appeal seems to be my leitmotif. i've a new venture in this arena -- combining, again, knitting and writing and images -- and at least pieces of it will be ready before the KT is. please visit the site for THE NOSHI KNITTING MONOGRAPH SERIES to find out more, and to enhance that information, feel free to read the post on my knitting blog that explains the NOSHI series and its origins.
there are a lot of balls in the air around here now, but they're all really awesome balls.
pumpkins are organic.
that's the difference between a pumpkin in october and a pumpkin the following march. makes sense, yes?
early on in owning the press i remember reading - i wish i could remember where - that letterpress type was also "organic", in a sense. it certainly does haved a lifecycle, particularly inexpensive monotype, which is what we are using. foundry type -- much harder metal type -- is prohibitively expensive for bookwork. we have some foundry fonts here, but in much smaller quantities than would be required for bookwork. so for the KT, we, like many, use a rather soft (as far as metals go) and less expensive type.
that means, due to the "organic" nature of the type, that it, like a pumpkin, goes south - more with use than with time. when a sort goes bad, it goes in the "hellbox" - because somebody, somewhere, is happy to melt the stuff back down again, and we're just as happy to let them.
we'll be ordering more sorts, soon, of frequently used letters (which - and i may have mentioned this before - are, historically, the letters in the word SENORITA. and it's true, those are the ones that are getting old on us quickest!) we'll also be ordering "rule" -- which is exactly what you'd think it is. it's the pieces you use to make lines on lined paper. the KT book will have ruled pages in the back, so those serious about their KT journey can make some notes about readings they know they'll want to look back upon.
juxtaposed here: the longest KT text (the four of spindles) and the shortest KT text (the six of skeins). we were curious about how each of these would test the limits of the page sizes we had chosen, so we decided to get them out of the way early. looking good!
this weekend was full of every possible aspect of KT work: printing, typesetting, cutting paper, sorting prints, making ready a form. somehow we did other stuff as well (made fondue and watched a sci-fi original movie called mortuary which was awful.)
after last weekend's knitting snafu, we worked harder than ever this past week to get ourselves back up to speed. we did it -- and learned a few tricks along the way (there are really no "shortcuts" in letterpress, but still, we learned a few things about how we decide what to print next -- more of a time management thing) -- and have probably found a way to shave a few weeks off the project in the long run, thanks to our eight days of very expensive recycling! really -- ya never know what's gonna pay off in the long run.
in doing some web maintenance, we discovered that the NOTIFY list feature for this page has been down. we don't know how long that's been wonky, but chances are better than good that someone's tried to sign up and has gotten turned away. it is now fixed.
if you, as a KT subscriber, know anyone who has had trouble using this feature and has not been able to sign up, please let a friend know that things are back in working order! and please -- if there's ever a problem, feel free to e-mail theknittingtarot@gmail.com, and let us know you can't get signed up. we'll fix it right away. and remember -- the folks who have signed up for the NOTIFY list feature will be notified when the book-and-deck sets are available for sale BEFORE people who just receive an RSS feed will be. the NOTIFY list is important, so make sure you -- and a friend who might have had trouble -- are on it!
more pictures soon!
from tonight on, in our home -- and maybe in yours -- the words remember sheet H1 will have major significance.
any time anybody rolls their eyes at me for checking to see if the door is locked one more time -- any time anybody groans or sighs when i say "are you sure?" -- remember sheet H1.
sheet H1 is the sheet (labelled so in the dummy for the book) that we've been printing for the last eight days. it's got a front and it's got a back. we were about forty prints -- an hour or two -- away from finishing both front and back.
when ben noticed the misnumbered page.
big ol' stack of recycling. many prepared foods to be eaten this week rather than exciting homecooked meals. stouffer's french bread pizzas. or cold cereal. all week. no seinfeld at seven thirty every night. just printing.
big sigh.
it was going to happen sooner or later. it had to. and it did, and we're just moving on -- we've made up a bit of progress already. but i'll feel better midweek -- when we're going to move onto a super-duper EASY sheet (there are some, of course, that are three-quarters blanks, or two blanks and two images -- and NO PAGE NUMBERS -- and therefore super-duper easy to print.) we need a few really easy days RIGHT NOW, but it'll be okay to get one thursday or so. maybe wednesday. nah, more likely thursday or friday.
feel free to buy me everything on my amazon wish list if you want. i'm obviously the only "amber dorko stopper" with a wish list on amazon. that might help.
:)
now now -- we know that i have a genetic predisposition to curse like a sailor, but i'm not -- what you see there is actually the bastard title page of the book, and that's what they call it -- for real. it's that title page before the title page -- with nothin' but the title, and fairly small and plain at that. look in a book, and likely, you'll find one.
this piece of paper is being held up to the light so that you can see the little doohickie on the other side of it. we think that came out rather cool.
when we are setting up a new form we do something called a "blind proof". you don't need ink to tell you how deep an impression is, or if it needs to be built up or cut away from... you can use a "blind", inkless proof. that's been done here, and if you open the larger image, and look to the left at the fallopianish curlicue, you might notice what i did... the cut was doing more than just debossing -- it was perforating the page. yikes! cool effect, but not here and not now.
that tragedy having been averted, here's a peek into a box of finished prints: and a look at the frontispiece (the aforementioned culprit) and the title page.
and, although you've seen it many times before, the printing station, which this morning had a rather charming look of a carl larsson painting about it. i printed this morning, then made spinach-matzoh ball soup, and in a while, we will print some more.
ignore that tired, weary expression on ben's face in the photo to your right. ben lies around all weekend, every weekend, watching australian-rules football and drinking unset instant pudding -- don't let this picture fool you. he does not come home from his work week and immediately jump into house renovation projects, weekly shopping, cooking, and hours of tedious presswork. he'd like you to think that, and for that reason, he's got the "it's sunday evening and i haven't stopped going since i got home friday night" expression down pat; don't fall for it.
it may also look as though ben has printed a page of the KT book that has an image AND a text on EACH side of the page. that, also, is a trick of the eye; here you see ben checking to see how text and images -- and the running heads and page numbers at the top of each page -- "back up" against one another. we are backing up the emperor now, to the empress text/hierophant image pages (because the book is printed in signatures, most texts are printed separate from their own illustration -- except of course for one in every signature, in the very center). we had a very, very productive printing weekend and are very happy with how it's going -- and delighted with our drop caps!
this weekend's listening:
peter murphy, holy smoke
fiona apple, extraordinary machine
diana krall, love scenes
johnny cash, at folsom prison
hei-kyung hong, korean songs
if you like oracles in general, you might like to check out the oblique strategies deck devised by musican brian eno.
really, it's something between an "oracle" and a little thing you'd buy at the "successories" store at the mall. i don't know that there's much to it, but it's interesting. here is the oblique strategies widget for mac OS X that i used to get the little mantra that i have used for the title of this post. i couldn't help but wonder what would happened if you decided to knit something using the oblique strategies method, but in a totally dependent manner, the way people listen to what oprah winfrey says. like, make no decisions other than what the deck suggested. as per your interpretation. hmmm. might try that.
i don't expect any "fast execution" with the KT but i have noticed that the more time is spent working on it and not making any prints -- futzing with this and that -- the better the next printing session is, and the lower our throwaway rate becomes, and those are both good things.
we've been printing for a few weeks and it's been slow and careful going -- there is some nail-biting involved in "backing up" the first sheets (printing all of one side, then printing the other side of them). yesterday ben had a good and useful conversation with steve pratt, ludovine's "father" -- he is now in the process of making the pratt-albion press #13 (ludo is pratt-albion #8). ludo's siblings now reside in sweden, australia, mississippi, and elsewhere in the world. when talking to ben, steve commented that he had decided -- having printed two books with pratt-albion #1 -- that it was sheer insanity and masochism to print more than one hundred of anything using this kind of press.
ha ha. so we're crazy masochists. but we're not INCREDIBLE crazy masochists, just moderate ones. and frankly, he's right.
as far as our printing goes, we have not generated numbers yet to take a guess as to when book printing will be finished. (binding comes after, and we are still taking our time to mull how things will be packaged up and presented). i hope to get closer to generating actual dates and printing goals to go with them in, perhaps, four weeks. by then, we'll have new images, too -- of THE EMPEROR and of some front matter.
we are printing the first pages of the book now. this week we made a little trip to the bindery in ivyland, where the KT book will become a book, rather than just a stack of collated signatures. it was exciting! we got to go into the machine room and see exactly how the signatures get sewn, which was very cool, except if i saw KT pages going through that machine i'd probably start clawing it and screaming and falling on the floor in convulsions. i suppose it's like watching a family member have surgery or something.
but it was interesting, the bindery. when i was in my late teens, i took off for england and spent a few months working in a greeting card factory in dover. like most such experiences, it gave me none of the things i had anticipated, and a bunch of warm memories that i hadn't. the bindery looks very much like the machine rooms i worked in in the factory in england, except at the bindery, no woman comes around with a basket of pastry-wrapped sausages twice a day. next time we go to visit, i will ask if it's okay to take some pictures, because there's a lot to look at.
where printing here at home is concerned, there's nothing to look at that y'all haven't seen before, so, no pictures today.
last night, a friend who is taking a journalism class taped a phone conversation with me for a piece she is writing about "slow" processes and things that take a long long loooooong time to do. talking to her about the very beginnings of the project, and our very first experiences with the press, made me remember a lot of the little things i tend to forget about it. like the fact that most homes don't have a printing press, and that most people, if faced with the prospect of setting 96-plus pages of writing in lead type, never yet completing more than seven lines in the course of one day, would have stopped doing it by now, out of exhaustion, lack of interest, or total frustration. and when we crunched the numbers on the whole book, i was, truly, tempted to tell my friend that i had to get off the phone and get to work.
this morning has been a nice at-home morning, with ben cutting paper and roller bearers, and me printing.
the soundtrack for this early phase of the bookwork is comprised entirely out of christmas gift cd's:
Ramones, Ramones
Ahmad Jamal, At the Pershing
Ethel, Ethel
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou soundtrack
Daniel Barenboim, Beethoven: The Complete Piano Sonatas, any one of ten discs in the set
it seems that shortly the Ethel disc is going to be replaced by fiona apple's Extraordinary Machine, because the normally-uncomplaining ben is apparently going to jump off the roof of the house if i don't take the Ethel out of there.
sometimes, when studying on something you're interested in, you'll make connections, and learn things about other things you're interested in.
(i'll warn you now that this post has NOTHING TO DO with the KNITTING TAROT specifically, except that it says something about patterns, and the way things transform throughout history, and printed matter, and if those things aren't of interest to the reader i'm not sure why the KNITTING TAROT would be anyway and you're probably not here to have this warning administered to you.)
i got a beautiful book for the holidays called Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s. it's fascinating to me in that i am generally fond of the french, and of the nineteenth century, and of course am always interested in printing -- particularly printed ephemera, examples of which this book contains plenty. in the book, i began reading about printed matter related to the play ubu roi by alfred jarry. something of a takeoff on macbeth, ubu roi premiered in 1896, with a backdrop designed and painted by, among others, pierre bonnard and toulouse-lautrec.
i was struck, when seeing the image of the advertisement for the play, how much it looked like a band flyer -- the kind made by the band themselves, with images and lettering pasted here and there, and photocopied, then photocopied again after putting a little white-out on all the parts where you could see that the thing had been cut-and-pasted out of many small bits.
at the same time i was thinking, ubu roi, ubu roi... that's mighty similar to pere ubu. and it was no coincidence, as pere ubu is in fact the main character in ubu roi.
you'd think it would have been hard for me to come up with, in comparison to the image above, flyers from club dates that pere ubu had played in philadelphia in the 1980s. actually, it was easy -- due to another holiday gift, albeit one given to me a few years ago. in an unassuming red pocket folder, in an unassuming little green envelope, i have a CD ROM entitled artifacts of the improbable -- a digital collection of many, many gig flyers from the '80s, all philadelphia area venues, cross-referenced out the wazoo.
it ends there; that's all i had to say. no big explanation about the "connection" to the two things; although there is one, it doesn't come with a sign attached to it to tell me what to do next with my life, but that doesn't mean it's not good to look for connections -- certainly it's good practice in the use of the tarot. and by all means, when an interesting printed item looks like it was made to be thrown away -- advertising an event in a fixed moment in time that will not come again -- for heaven's sake, just stuff it in a book somewhere, for someone else to find it. you never know what kind of pleasure and wonder that will bring.
by the way, ben has discovered that the bayeux tapestry has nothing to do with the battle of hastings or the norman conquest. it did however fortell the untimely death of joey ramone!
there's an assumption we make about people who subscribe to this blog; it's that they will, at some point, be receptive to entries about the less glamorous aspects of this project. we assume that readers of this blog want a "behind the scenes" look. so, here we are, behind the scenes, home on a saturday night, printing.
behold: our new drying rack!! this thing is great. we used to lay prints all over the room on every flat surface (we even invented some flat surfaces just to lay prints on.) now, with this, we can stack five within each of those little bins you see -- and, as we've never made more than 90 prints in a day (and usually more like 60-75), this rack will hold more than a day's work at any given time! nice, safe, and dry!
and if you like drying racks, wait until you see our new brayer. look at that! weighty and substantial. if brayers were horses, this brayer would be... well, wait -- if cars were brayers -- no... if all brayers were gwyneth paltrow... eh, forget it.
both of these new niceties make a big difference in printing. things go more smoothly and are more fun when using 'em.
it's not glamorous, but you know the look that non-knitters get on their faces when you start going into raptures over your lantern moon needles? well, then you can see it from our side, too, we bet. say it with us! oooohhhh, new drying rack! aaaahhhhhhh, the brayer! the lovely new brayer!
be amazed at their powers.
hey. if you think you're ready to see something more than the text for The Empress, imagine what it's like to be here. we've been looking at it for some weeks and we haven't actually started the "real" printing for the page yet -- are still playing with margins for the book, the page numbering, the running heads, and waiting for a final typo-proofing on this text in particular. however -- if you click to enlarge -- you'll see more or less what the pages of the book will look like! and we. are. proud.
it's still two weeks or so before the paper for the book is delivered to the house. all six hundred pounds of it. that's right -- a heavier purchase of paper than the press itself weighs. how about THAT? not to mention the fact that our house will be in the process of having two of its staircases entirely ripped out and replaced DURING the time this paper is delivered... suffice it to say, it's going to be CRAZY around here for some weeks to come...
but rest assured that NO ONE orders six hundred pounds of paper without a distinct and detailed plan about how to get it back OUT of the house. and into other people's houses. and that's what we're working on!
last night, we tested some carefully chosen papers for use in the KNITTING TAROT book. while we were not able to get great quality prints for any of them -- to create the proper "packing" in the press it must be done for each different paper, which is very time consuming and not very practical if you are only printing a few sheets of each -- we were able to see how each paper looked with the text and images on it, and how easily it printed. these factors, in addition to color, cost, ease of cutting (papers with deckles require more cuts to remove those edges), and size of paper (it's pretty annoying if, say, the paper you like comes in sheets big enough to accommodate 1.89 trimmed sheets in the size your project needs -- it amounts to almost half of what you buy becoming waste), we are on our way to making a choice.
as you can see above, the pages of the book are not meant to "match" the deck itself. nor do we want them to clash outright. but these two colors -- the color of the deck itself and the color of the book's pages -- are two out of either four or five colors of paper that will make up the entire "package" of the KT book and deck. in addition to the deck and page stock, there is the linen cover of the book itself; the dust jacket (which, in the case of the deluxe editions, will probably match the slipcovers that are planned), and then the possible fifth color involved would be that of endpapers (which might in fact end up the same color as the dustjackets -- five seems a lot of colors to try to pull together. four seems more reasonable.)
regardless of how quickly we decide now, it is unlikely that we will see our paper order arrive before christmas. that's okay, because i am, happily, working ahead on setting texts, as well as tweaking on the one that's in the bed now. we are also ordering some new brayers, stocking up on ink, and having some more illustrations made into magnesium cuts.) is it any surprise that i'm not knitting as much as i was a couple of weeks ago?
text is in the bed of the press! it's the text for the empress, and we've been tweaking it here and there, and preparing to try out papers! it's alllllll starting up again, folks! (look at the drop cap! isn't it neat?)
it was really nice to have that big, long break from the presswork itself, but we are now itching to get back to it. also, it was nice to take some time to step away from the deck, because i just rifled through mine last night, and, with that little bit of distance, not having to look at each card a hundred times in a day, i'm SO, SO happy with how this is going!
meanwhile, i've also been setting the type for other texts -- trying to get into a groove where i don't have to be super-crunched to both print and set a lot of type in the same day. i want to stay a few texts ahead of the game at all times. not a glamorous set-up, but plenty of internet '80's radio, and i can even watch a dvd at this desk, on the laptop!
woo hoo!
today is a special day for the KNITTING TAROT, as today, our favorite yarn store -- our only yarn store -- rosie's yarn cellar -- celebrates its TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY in their rittenhouse square philadelphia location. ten years! in fact, for me, a little more than ten, as i remember being excited about their opening a few weeks before they actually did it! it is, emphatically, the official knitting store of the KNITTING TAROT -- how could it not be? have you looked at major arcana card V.? doesn't it look a little familiar to you philly folks?
happy tenth anniversary to rosie's yarn cellar -- a wise shop indeed -- a shop that makes smarter, better knitters of everyone who comes through its doors.
as you all know, we finished printing and collating the KNITTING TAROT decks a month ago, and, while we have not printed a thing since, we've hardly been sitting on our hands. planning a layout for a book is a big business, and we've had to consult with our binder as well as map out all the little "extra" illustrations we would need.
above you see an illustration to be used on the title page that introduces the court cards in the KNITTING TAROT book. we know a few things about the book that we didn't a month ago: the book will be case-bound (a "hardback") and will be 186 pages long. it will also contain five pages of rule in the back matter, so that KT practicioners may make notes about particularly significant readings.
we still are not sure what paper we will be using, but ben has recently cleaned ludovine so that she is sparkling and smooth-running, and he will be working on the form for book printing in the bed of the press as early as this week. then we will be running paper tests, and we will report upon them here.
we did it! WE FINISHED PRINTING THE DECKS! they are all snug and safe.
we celebrated with a weekend trip to manhattan. the fiber related details and the personal ones can be read about in the regular places.
we were working HARD towards this particular weekend date. we really needed the break from printing -- it's hard work. but we pushed ahead in the hopes that when we did break, it would be october, and we would have a few weekends of pure play ahead of us (while of course we cleaned ludo, visited the binder, etc. etc.)! we are still feeling rather stunned -- sometimes it's hard to take in the enormity of the project.
and, the book is next, and i expect it is at least a full year of work. i am really looking forward to it.
ADDENDUM i noticed today that this post is, in fact, the 78th post to be made on this blog! how incredible is THAT?
For a press to be private a double qualification seems necessary: the books it prints must not be obtainable by any chance purchaser who offers a price for them and the owner must print for his own pleasure and not work for hire for other people. -- Alfred W. Pollard.
without question, we want every copy of THE KNITTING TAROT book-and-deck set to go to those who really, really get it. not that we can set up a screening system (we won't), but i have to say, i'm pleased to see that the whole "knitting craze" is definitely on the downturn. with the limited edition that we are providing, i would hate to see most of them go to a bunch of johnny-come-latelys who just have have have to have all the cutest little knitting whatsits, and who probably aren't even going to be knitting two years from now. we want to make good matches between the KT and its users, because it is a very limited -- and once-in-a-lifetime -- edition, and it's special.
we sure didn't overestimate how many true KT/user "love matches" there are out there, just for the sake of making a dollar or two. but there's something really, purely satisfying about that. and we know that a lot of people are going to treasure this. that's awesome to us.
we are one form away from finishing the decks. about three days of work left on printing -- then just about that many collating. then... the book.
as we close in on the completion of the decks (yes, it's true -- there are perishable dairy products in my refrigerator that will still be edible when the decks are finished being printed), i wish to note that i have taken some artistic/poetic license with the titling on the cards.
all of the minors have "double" titles -- titles on either side of a colon. on the left of the column is how the card is identified in the deck -- on the other side, what it means. since the KT has such specific corrolaries and substitutions, these titles were undoubtedly necessary.
and these "extra" titles exist as well in the aces, or will do so in the book -- but i did not put them on the cards themselves. knitting for the sake of creating, knitting for the sake of challenge, etc. -- i left these "prompts" as it were off of the four printed aces. why? partially because they all contained the words "knitting for the sake of" and that seemed like a lot to put on a card. we've had enough challenge with some of our longer card titles. plus, it was repetitive. plus, at very least, i think it's a nice idea to have to remember what these suits represent, and i felt the aces were the best place to view the "heart" of the suits.
anybody who thinks what separates "expert" tarot users from novices is the ability to memorize what every card means, is fooling themselves. some of the best readings i have ever had have come from readers (one in particular) who liked to consult one or more texts during the reading. still, to see an ace and have to tap internally to get the "meaning" may carry over an ability to do it naturally with other cards in the suit. so there you go -- partially a practical move, partially a didactic one.
you will also see in the scan above that i made this same split decision with the majors, in the corrolary cards that differed totally from what was seen in a "traditional" tarot deck. while the KT has a high priestess and an empress and emperor and many other "traditional" cards, it also has some switches. you will see above -- for some of those, i added the "traditional", expected title in parenthesis. for some -- like "untangling" -- i didn't.
reason? same as above. for some cards, i liked how it looked better without, and i didn't think it would kill anybody to "have" to learn to remember -- or to consult their book.
a purely personal decision, but now you don't have to wonder why!
right on schedule -- adorable image on front and text on back -- and the mug itself has a perfect, cozy heft (not to mention the snuggly curved-to-the-hand shape of the "diner-style" design!)
some will go out tomorrow, and they should all be out by tuesday (due to the labor day holiday on monday), priority mail. alas, there are NO extras available -- and that one up there is mine.
such is the collating and bagging of the twelve newest finished cards. those in the know will see the cards pictured here and realize, if i am indeed doing this in groups of twelve, i will only be doing it twice more before it's all done. forever.
this is part of the process that i really like, since i am a great fan of repetitive activity. it beats rocking back and forth all day, which, if i didn't have so much "meaningful" repetitive activity (like knitting) in my life, i just might be doing. i used to work for a ticketing office and i loved taking full responsibility for bulk mailings in which there had to be all kinds of little inserts, facing certain directions, all folded and enveloped, and then sorted by zip code... i was downright possessive about those mailings and resented the suggestion that the work could not be all mine, all the time. well, now, it is. (because i do not let ben help me collate KT cards, either.)
internet radio keeps me going. last night, spandau ballet's "true" came on and ben -- having been undoubtedly in a stroller at the time this song was popular -- thought that the "this much is tru-hue" chorus at the end was "it's not just junk food". (listen to the song and you too may hear it.)
now that this is done, onto printing the last four "skeins" minors.
...scanned for your viewing pleasure -- and for the most accurate representation of the color of our cardstock that i have been able to post here yet. i am happy to have a scanner!
i'll get some more close-ups later. i would be happy to scan a little more to show off, but i bet you'd rather i was just printing. we have a goal to finish the DECKS (not the book, the book is not even begun, the DECKS) by the end of september. to do that we will need to shave 14 days off of our current estimation. to shave those days off, we need to be printing more than 60 prints per day -- and printing more than 5.1 days per week. so... you know where to find me.
okay. you knew i had ordered a few extra mugs, of course -- which i do because i recognize that no matter when a deadline is set for anything, you can see the Extenuating Circumstances Posse juuuuust on the horizon! (and i mean that in a caring way -- i've been there too.)
and yes, it's true, the EXTRA mugs are now gone as well, it seems... or at least for the moment spoken for... so that truly does seem to be it.
a few knitting retailers did query about wholesale orders for mugs, and while we are still openly considering selling the book-and-deck set through a few other select shops and galleries that have asked, we did decide that all the schwag* would continue to be sold through this site only. but we will keep you up to date on wholesale book-and-deck sets!
i hope to be posting on the deck's progress this week, with photos and maybe even some scans. work is literally stacking up around here because the fellow who does all the machine cutting for us (cutting pages of four cards into single tarot cards) was off being ordained as a minister in the solarian faith. now he is back, and we are catching up on deck assembly. hopefully by the end of the week we can show you how things are progressing.
more later!
* i have been meaning to make note of this somewhere for some time: the word is SCHWAG, i know this, because the copy of wired magazine in which i believe it was coined sat in our bathroom for about two years! i notice people saying "swag" and i have bitten off significant portions of my tongue keeping myself from correcting them -- i can no longer taste sour or bitter things correctly, i have a practically ellen jamesian tongue, and now i just had to say something. it's schwag.
thanks y'all! we ordered ver-ry few extras, so likely those of you who ordered are the only folks who'll ever have 'em in the QUEEN OF SKEINS design.
the production order has been placed and we will let you know how it's all coming!
we'll be back shortly with an update on the printing... are you aware that we are finished printing, cutting and collating NOT ONLY all the courts and majors, but are HALFWAY THROUGH THE MINORS? we HAVE been busy.
back at you soon!
here's our agatha, sitting at her desk, not even bothering to hide her knitting from her boss, and drinking, of course, from a KNITTING TAROT mug! agatha is beginning her collection with the queen of skeins mug... shouldn't you be also?
and how about one for a friend, to tuck away until the holidays?
we plan to be shipping these on or before the first week in september. the store will be open to orders from today THROUGH NOON ON FRIDAY AUGUST 12, at which point we will close orders.
as usual, paypal is the way to pay. if you do not have a paypal account, you can still use a major credit card through paypal's site to pay for your purchases on this site. simply follow paypal's instructions. it's fast, it's easy, it's secure.
as you can see, agatha likes the queen of skeins because they have the same hairdo.
all the rest of the cuts for the cards themselves came today. in fact, but for a few little fancies here and there, we have all the engravings we are going to have. all the minors are in this and one other package. some of them, honestly, i had forgotten about -- and that is so fun, it feels all new again. some of them are so cute!
okay. so? when they make "THE KNITTING TAROT: THE MOVIE"? some of the little mag cuts are gonna be played by bjork.
i love acting out little scenes with the tall ones. they are kind of creche-like.
i found this while cleaning my in/out baskets yesterday (i found a LOT of things). i remember doing this as a whim -- a chart to see how a KT design would knit up. i didn't knit it, though.
thought and discussion has been given to how folks will eventually carry their decks around, if that is what they choose to do -- or at least, how they will store them. while the decks will come wrapped, they will not have a hard box for storage. some folks have suggested -- and it has flitted across my own mind -- providing an official "pattern" for a knitted bag in which to carry a KNITTING TAROT deck.
but then i feel pretty certain that anyone who knows me at all would recognize how disinclined i would be to such a thing -- "official" bag pattern. bah! my HOPE, of course, is that people DO make bags for their KT decks -- all different types, and sure, if you want to try to chart a design, go ahead and do so -- we'll take a very "grateful dead" approach to that! but of course, i would HOPE that everyone would then send us a picture, so we could have a gallery. i would like to see the bags, when they came to being. it's a given, right, that all y'all would send a picture?
(no, it's NOT a given, because i'm STILL waiting for a promised photo of TODDLER TWINS IN "SUN" T-SHIRTS, AND I NEVER GOT IT. and you wonder why i'm not chomping at the bit to do t-shirts again?! show me the love, people!)
***
and now, in MUG news -- thank you, so many of you, for attending immediately to the survey. it is possible that results are still trickling in, but, since the very first few, they've all pooled predictably towards the same results:
we will be beginning what will PROBABLY be a series of four mugs -- and possibly six -- with the QUEEN OF SKEINS. we will offer the mugs one at a time, over time (kinda like the way people used to collect drink glasses from gas station promotions!)
whether four or six mugs are produced in the long run, we will try to mix it up a bit with designs. there is still a strong desire to see the HIGH PRIESTESS, yet again, now on a mug and not just a t-shirt. but i also wanted to try some new ones; including a "minor" card.
if male knitters are looking for male representation, you better let me know.
and yes, we hear you, you want t-shirts again. we are processing your request. thank you come again!
info will be posted within a week or so about QUEEN OF SKEINS diner mug ordering. it will also go out on the NOTIFY list.
i'm excited -- and me, who just nearly gave up coffee!
truly, it's not the time of year to be thinking about hot beverages, but even in the middle of the summer, folks drink coffee.
furthermore, it isn't going to be the middle of summer for much longer. and, in the heat of printing the decks, we have scaled back on our KT schwag, but have recently found a source for microwave-safe "diner style" mugs (see image), which have always been our favorite type of mugs. and, with so many new people on the NOTIFY list, and so many new KNITTING TAROT practitioners-to-be -- who missed out on last years t-shirts -- we are now taking a poll to gauge diner mug interest, and to chose an initial design. IF YOU THINK YOU'D LIKE A KNITTING TAROT COFFEE MUG, TAKE THE POLL NOW TO LET YOUR INPUT DETERMINE HOW MANY, AND WHICH DESIGNS, WE MAY MAKE AVAILABLE.
as with t-shirts, these would be an order-ahead, wait-a-few-weeks type of item (as opposed to letterpress prints, cards and bookplates, which usually go out immediately -- we don't mention them if they aren't already sitting here.) something new to drink your coffee, tea or cider from at the office, come fall? a gift for a pal? check out the survey!
aaah, i have been waiting sooooo long to get to this particular form -- like i said before, these are the cards that make you really FEEL like you're printing a TAROT DECK.
here are the two grand ladies of tarot -- the high priestess and the empress -- on an uncut sheet.
here's a closer view of the empress in which you can better see how the impression "bites" into the paper. i love it.
here's a way too close picture of the high priestess. you can see her pores! but she is so cute.
and here is the little yarn shop (hierophant).
ludovine loves a little humidity when it comes to printing. i do not. ludovine definitely bucks the air conditioning. i like to be chilly, if possible. but we do it ludovine's way -- and are therefore trying to do more morning and evening printing. with lots of 80's internet radio, the time goes by quickly, and is good fun.
we are arranging "auditions" for paper to be used for the pages of the book soon!
don't worry: your deck won't be covered in pumpkin pollen! these are cards from the "dummy deck" that i add to whenever we have printed new cards. i use this deck to shuffle, carry around, etc., to see how long it takes to start looking well-worn or at least unpristine. nothing yet, actually.
we tend to collate and add to the decks in groups of eight cards; it's manageable. that's what i am doing today, along with printing backs, and staying out of the intense philadelphia heat.
the next fronts-form up is an exciting one. high priestess, empress, emperor and hierophant/yarn shop. boy, printing cards like those REALLY gives me that "golden moment": i'm handprinting TAROT DECKS!
i think we'll print up some extras of that form for use as postcards (we have the full court of skeins set aside for that purpose as well, and a standard postcard "back" design being worked on.)
yesterday i found a REALLY cool source for coffee mugs -- that thick diner-style with the somewhat turned-out shape. and i thought, should we do coffee mugs? which cards would be featured if we did? input is always welcome.
yesterday morning in the bathroom i saw proof of something i had predicted would happen. standing with my arms perpendicular to my body, it was clear that my upper arms -- which have always been heavy -- look different. more specifically, my left upper arm -- the one i use to turn the handle that moves the bed in and out of the press -- is noticably more toned than the right.
when i first started printing the deck, i switched off arms, mostly due to fatigue. that switching off required the tiny pivot of my knee joints that has my knee out of whack currently -- and i no longer do it, for that reason and also because i don't need to. i don't get fatigued the way i did at the beginning when it comes to printing.
while using the press i try to do a lot of pilates-correct movements. i try to keep a navel-to-spine connection and breathe into the upper lobes of my lungs. i keep my "wings" low. i use the muscles directly above my hip sockets to float my body a little easier. sometimes i do kegel exercises. there are all kinds of opportunities at the press.
pilates is incredible because it teaches you not only to stop overusing muscles that were never meant to be used as much as we use them (shoulderblades and neck, particularly) -- causing stress and fatigue -- but because it teaches you that you have huge, wrapping muscles all throughout your torso that are generally underused, just waiting around like big stevedores at the dock, hoping to get picked for daywork. once you get them going, things change. you feel the results before you see the results, but once you start to feel results, your body yearns for what is right and really lets you know just how wrong "wrong" has felt all these years.
i can do things today that i could not do when i was twenty-five. it's pretty cool.
the idea of one popeye arm and one regular one is a little disconcerting, although since my upper arms have always been one of my least favorite things about my body, i don't have any clothes that show them in either condition.
the moon, the sun, and the star -- you can't have a tarot deck without them. they are big anchors in the major arcana.
one of the harder things to do in letterpress is ink and print solid black areas smoothly. and yet -- part of what makes the decks so interesting, and each different from the other, is the effect it has when inking takes on a life of its own -- as seen here in the moon's tie dye dress!
i was so happy when this funky little detail showed up that i actually considered putting this card aside so i would have it in my own copy of the deck. but, i let that idea go and did happen across it in time to get a picture (although not an excellent one -- a little washed out due to the ott-lite).
speaking of which, do they make an ott-lite you can wear on your head like a miners' helmet? all i do is drag that thing back and forth between the printing room and the den where i knit.
in a three-day weekend we managed both to get a break from printing AND to get ahead in printing!
we have once again been churning out huge backs-of-cards stacks and are going back to the majors this week. the form that is being built now (my fingertips are still drying from my super-handwashing after working with the type) is, i believe, the only form in the whole process that is made up of four cards with no "human" figures on them. these cards are cards X. - XIII. -- in traditional tarot, the wheel through death, and in the KNITTING TAROT, the swift and winder through binding off.
