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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.
the eight card fronts we most recently completed -- including the sun, the moon and other big stars in the tarot scene, will get collated this week and tucked into the decks-in-progress. i'll have pictures of them then.
if you look over to the right of the page there, you will see the orange-and-brown bloglines subscription button and the SUBSCRIBE TO THE KNITTING TAROT FEED (XML) links.
these are new features here. more and more people are using rss readers and services like bloglines to keep track of their favorite reads on line. we make these feeds available now because it cuts down on the NOTIFY e-mails we will have to send out.
but be clear -- the NOTIFY list is still important if you want to be alerted, before the general population, when the KNITTING TAROT book-and-deck go on sale -- in fact, when they are available for pre-order. that early announcement -- engraved digital invitation, if you will -- is really a "thank you" for having been NOTIFIED so many times in the past of our progress. it is a big part of what keeps us going, the nice e-mails from you people, and knowing that you are along for the ride with us, and not just snapping your wallets open when all the work is done! THANK YOU.
with the rss feed, i will send out fewer NOTIFY e-mails, but the ones that DO come will be more significant in relation to the release of the KNITTING TAROT and will ONLY come to people who are ON THE LIST. that is the list's special thank-you privilege.
strap on a feedbag and get the XML! or add us to your bloglines feeds! (my k-blog has the feed on now,
too.)
in other news, the rest of the stock -- or what we are crossing our fingers IS the rest of the stock -- for the decks has arrived. and gibson parker gibson is here to tell you that, even when you're on top of it, it's pretty heavy. you can't get this kind of breaking news anywhere but here, folks!
when new people find the KT pages and sign up for the NOTIFY list, a few always e-mail about "reserving" decks -- just to be sure they aren't missing out on anything (after all, the site info could be out of date, and i can't blame anybody for trying!)
i am surprised, consistently, by the number of people who say that they are going to "need two" of the book-and-deck set. a lot of people want two.
i said to ben the other day, "i really hope these people are getting the second set as a gift for someone else. i hope they aren't just planning to put it..."
and then we spoke simultaneously:
amber: "in a time capsule!"
ben: "up on ebay!"
hmmm. i think ben's train of thought might be the one to follow here. well, we REALLY hope people aren't going to do THAT. that is something we're going to keep track of.
as for time capsules... whatever.
slowly and with deliberation, we have been shaping what determines the difference between a "standard" book-and-deck set and a "deluxe" one.
in common printing practice, a deluxe edition would be on much finer papers than the standard edition. where the decks are concerned, the standard and deluxe editions will be utterly identical. that's because we picked what we felt was the best, sturdiest, and most appropriate stock for the job. it's certainly a "fine" paper stock, but it's not frou-frou. it has organic imperfections, and an overall feel of simplicity -- utilitarianism.
we want the decks to be used. we want people to feel it's okay when their decks GET used. the decks, as stated before, will not be of "coated" stock like a deck of playing cards, or even like a tarot deck you buy in a bookstore. like many art decks, the KT is uncoated. but it will take wear and tear. i currently have cards set aside that i shuffle regularly -- when i am sweaty, when there is lotion on my hands -- to see just how much abuse they will take. so far, so good.
of course (and it is a very important thing to remember in all aspects of life), all printed matter is very suceptible. fifty-cent sheets of paper and $100 sheets of paper all act pretty much the same when faced with scissors, a zippo lighter, or a ladlefull of marinara sauce.
back to the issue of deluxe v. standard -- we continue to brainstorm if differences will occur where the book itself is concerned. we haven't chosen stock for the book yet and, with the general tone of the project, i don't wish to differentiate these books by making one of them look like a wedding invitation. that seems inappropriate. we are already considering taking the very offbeat step of a coated-wire spiral binding on the book, because we truly feel it will best serve the vision of the project -- the book will stay open, like a recipe book, and will be very sturdy, and the pages will not have to be creased to keep texts open to look at during a reading. much easier to flip back and forth.
once again, when we choose a paper, it will be because it's the number one top-choice paper that reflects the nature of the endeavor. i have no intention of picking another, more expensive paper JUST to make it "deluxe". so the text of the book, as well as the deck, may ALSO be identical in the deluxe and standard editions.
there will be differences in presentation and storage -- that we know -- but we don't wish to give away any surprises quite yet. and, extra things come with the deluxe set.
a good friend of the KT -- in what i consider a rare moment of insanity -- suggested that ONLY the "deluxe" editions get the full book, and the standard editions get only a little quickie pamphlet, not letterpressed, and not with full texts. NO WAY!!!!!! (slap slap slap to reality) above all else for me, the KT has been a WRITING project. i think of it as a piece of my writing as much i do any short story, any piece of music journalism, anything i've ever done. so no WAY. even if people WANTED just the deck and not the book -- they would get the slap slap slap. and they would get the BOOK.
so, everyone gets the book. and the deck. and, still, we are thinking.
we are gearing up to print the major arcana. yesterday, we got all the mag cuts for all the majors, and it is always such fun to look at them. we are printing the majors "backwards" in sets of four, so we will be doing the moon, the sun, trying on (judgment) and the world first.
something i have always loved about the "trying on" card is the expression on this face. you know how they say people who draw look like their drawings? in this case it is so true. megan makes this exact face.
it's funny how some illustrations that were not "favorites" when i saw them digitally, suddenly become more charming simply by some small twist of perception -- seeing them in magnesium rather than pixels. or seeing them in ink. or, in one case i can think of (the princess of skeins), seeing the way the white space around them enhanced their meaning. in this case, we see "untangling (strength)". pretty cute...
... but even better when you look at this mighty mighty tangle! whoa! it's so cool!
something else i really like is the difference in sizes and perspective on each illustration. here are two cuts side by side (and a little shadowed): "the cast-on (the fool)" and "the yarn shop (the hierophant)". look how different they are! and does that yarn shop look a little familiar?
this swift and winder image has always been one of my favorites though, and i can't wait to see it in ink.
who remembers what traditional tarot card is represented in the KNITTING TAROT by the swift and winder? the first person who answers correctly gets a prize! UPDATE: DING DING DING DING DING DING! to regina c. who clearly gets her e-mail VERY early in the morning!
we have a break from printing for the next few days. we ran out of paper! ran out. and, while we could have begun printing the sun, moon, trying on/judgment and world onto the fronts of the backs that were already printed -- we were waiting on the order for those cuts to come, too! thwarted at every turn... and not a bad thing considering how my shoulder feels. so ben got busy and cleaned and oiled ludovine this weekend, and today i will begin building the form for those four majors.
i'm about a third of the way through sorting and "unit testing" the court cards. we moved all the paper and finished cards down from the third floor -- where it's going to be hot this summer -- to the spinning room, which is darker, air conditioned, and in which we can put a dehumidifier. but in the past week, the KT decks-in-progress have gone from being housed in a built-in cabinet to both the cabinet and the closet... they grow.
sheets of uncut cards were drying, as usual, all over the print room yesterday, when i suddenly noticed that they all looked like they had been brought up from an excavation site -- a serious layer of particulate matter was spread over them! we live across from a ballfield, and i now see that it will be important, during these months when open windows are the thing, to not open the window in front of where we do drying -- at least not when the ballfield is dry and dusty. today, the ballfield is damp, and it makes no difference how wide i have the window, everything is fine.
i hope by next week to have ALL the courts for ALL the decks in order and squirreled away in cool dry places, at which point, it will be backs backs backs for as long as i can stand it (i'm printing them now while sorting court cards, in fact.) when i can NO LONGER stand printing backs, we will begin the majors -- which we will be printing in reverse order in sets of four.
VERY limited numbers of uncut court card sheets -- for the courts of needles, skeins, and gauge -- will be available soon. making them kinda breaks the rhythm, and so not only did we make fewer, but we will NOT be doing "uncut sheet" prints for any other cards than the courts. watch this space -- these will be available for sale soon (and if you would like to just e-mail us and get your hand in now, we will set what you want aside before the actual store opens. our new e-mail address again is: theknittingtarot@gmail.com.)
this just made me happy to look at. i am so glad we chose the paper stock we did -- it's a lovely oyster color -- much like camilla's wedding ensemble, no? which was handsome and appropriate, might i add.
we've been moving the ball along this week with the deck. in fact, by this time next week, i think i can safely say that ALL the court cards will be printed, both fronts and backs, and will possibly be cut and collated as well. some are now.
getting the decks printed and assembled has never been my biggest concern. it's the book that kinda freaks me out.
more artwork in magnesium form came this week. a favorite is the cut for "blocking/the chariot". cute little blocking board! this is one, i think, i would like to use when we print up some blank notecards.
i also like the "new" emperor -- he has undergone a transformation from the original illustration.
i bet some of you also have opinions on which illustrations you would like to see in notecard or postcard sets. we will have to find a way to hear you out.
as expected, we switched out the form and started the court of needles. this bunch shouldn't be in the bed for even a full week -- we'll have them finished, i think, by thursday if we are on track.
it poured here today -- i may have mentioned this previously but boy does that make a big difference with letterpress. humidity. good thing that during the summer, we'd be running the air conditioner in this room anyway -- we are definitely going to have to get a dehumidifier.
now that the back-of-card image is permanently etched into the insides of my eyelids, and we are only about twenty percent of the way there with them, the idea that it would be "simple" to do all the backs at once is no longer an appealing one. we are switching out the backs this weekend to move in another set of courts -- either the needles or the gauge suit. see over to the right, the cut for the queen of gauge -- taken from above -- i like to look at the dimensionality of these cuts before they are applied to paper (and before they are covered with ink, and then, of all things, non-stick PAM, which is how you maintain and care for magnesium cuts. gross isn't it?)
as we did with the court of spindles, we will make prints of each of the court illustrations available in a very limited quantity, signed and numbered, on the store. there are still some court of spindles prints left. if you had thought about getting one, be swift. if you were someone who had wanted all FOUR (and wouldn't that look nice in a knitting/sewing room), i would be extra swift -- because i can see people feeling really sad that they missed out on the first one. no more will be printed. (i will not be pursuaded to clean off all the PAM until the cuts are needed for printing the book.)
i am looking forward to using the new batch of illustration cuts that came this week. anything other than backs!
backs. thousands. of. backs.
in these past few weeks as we have begun printing the actual cards for the actual decks that people will actually own and actually use, i have been touched by the number of e-mails that i have gotten specifically addressing me and the reminder that i be "careful" during printing, in regard to repetitive stress injuries and general fatigue.
i am never sure what exactly people picture working the press is like. she is a small press indeed, not meant for printing giant sheets of paper that might then be cut into numerous printed pages. for "book" purposes, ludovine could not really print more than four pages simultaneously onto a sheet -- her bed is small. she is what is called a "folio" press, meant for limited bookwork (of physically small books) and broadsides, greetings, and the like.
although she is small, ludo is a handpress, which not all letterpresses are. she does not work with a treadle or any kind of automobility. every impression made on ludovine is made by a person moving the bed of the press itself into place with a crank-style handle, and then pulling a bar which brings down the platen of the press. do it once, get one impression. do it again (after rolling the bed back out, removing the paper you have printed on, putting fresh paper in, and inking the type and impressions), and get another.
as you have seen, there are four "cards" to each page. so, everytime we ink, place paper in the press, roll the bed in, pull the bar, roll the bed out, open the tympan and frisket assembly to take the paper out, put the paper down somewhere, put new paper in... we have printed ONE side of four separate cards. (which, in the long run, will have two printed sides.)
again, i don't know what most people were picturing, but i think it's nice that some of you thought "wow, i bet that's hard on the feet/hands/whatever".
it is. i have rotten feet to begin with; they aren't worth the bone meal they could be ground up for. you should see x-rays of them -- it looks like h.r. geiger thought them up. and moving the bed in and out, particularly, is hard on the rotator cuff and elbow. also, all the short-stepping and pivoting in a small space has made for some knee pain. we are working to remedy this, not only for me but for ben and kathy and any other individuals involved in the actual printing, by adjusting where the inking slab is kept, and putting together a drying rack system better than what we currently have.
here's the new inking setup, which in and of itself added a few impressions to my personal best printing day.
this change motivated me to incorporate a lot of other changes into my routine, so that i could be getting maximum productivity concurrent with maximum enjoyment. i ADORE the process of printing. it's a damned good thing. i itch for it; sometimes i get a whiff of ink or naturewash at a time of day i am NOT printing, and i get all yearnful.
other things that help alleviate the repetitive stress on the body parts:
having multiple limbs. yes, it actually took a few weeks of printing before i realized i did not have to do it all with my left arm. (while i write with my right hand, i do most other things -- turning keys in doors, etc. -- with my left.) now i switch off.
dancing. i seem to have perfected an undoubtedly unattractive little routine here! it's a lot of high-knees action and spinning -- but it makes the whole process more fun, and reminds me not to lock into any position too hard.
add some pilates and "miracle ball" exercises when i am not printing -- things which frankly every knitter can use, for good ergonomics and relaxation -- and what do you know? i feel great!
with spring, i have a whole lot of new energy. there were a lot of people seeming to recognize this past winter as a real killer where seasonal depression was concerned. it was AWFUL, wasn't it? it seems to be over -- for the past few weeks my energy, patience, and enthusiasm for just about everything is boundless. but, in the weeks that it was not, i had been researching cognitive therapy techniques for tracking activity and responses during my "work" day. my printing sessions (as my writing time, etc.) are self-motivated, and self-scoring. i wanted to know more about when my "best" times were, why my not-best times weren't, and what i could do to maximize productivity while aligning it with that great lost-in-activity feeling.
also, while i had not practiced transcendental meditation for a few years, i was trained in the program in, i think, 2000 or 2001. i dusted off my mantra recently -- because i'm feeling so fresh and motivated! jai guru dev y'all! om!
so for those who expressed kind and friendly concern for my long haul in the "lightless garrett" or "sweatshop" as some of you imaginitive online pals have described my life with the KT... there you go.
it has been a year now that we have had ludovine -- she came to us on march 16, 2004. these photos were featured on my knitting blog on that day but here they are again:
as you see, we had a little party. ben even took the spongebob hats to work and passed out tastycakes. and, contrary to what the pictures show, it was actually ludovine who put up the biggest fight when it came to wearing the party hat.
currently available on the store are a signed, limited edition of thirty prints featuring the entire Court of the Spindles: King, Queen, Prince and Princess. these are indeed the four "fronts" of the corresponding cards in the KNITTING TAROT deck, as they will appear in the deck itself. these prints however are printed on a lighter stock -- rives "heavyweight" in buff.
each print is titled, signed and numbered by illustrator megan dorko.
we do plan on making the other courts available as prints, when we begin printing those cards as well, in very limited amounts. we will not be printing the Court of Spindles again; these thirty prints are the only prints that will exist.
they make elegant, understated, original wall decor, and are an excellent mandala and focal point for spinners, and knitters who identify strongly with the spindles suit, wherein knitting is done for the higher purpose of meeting physical need, and creating warmth for muscles and minds that need that warmth to work. the beautiful cycle continues.
each print is $25 and will come priority mail in a safe and sturdy tube.
i've given you the mis-en-place, now a little mood. ai yi, yi, all this printing, it's like waiting tables. i have to build up some stamina. a lot of time on the feet.
a tangent today, mostly about typography.
most folks reading this weblog are familiar with the "world" of knitbloggers, which, at its least attractive, can be pretty damned unattractive. surely, there are gems to be found and pals to be made, but there are some pervasive "sensibilities" and garden-variety smoke-and-mirrors acts, and one learns to navigate to get the best out of the experience.
if knitters and spinners are "of a type", y'all should check out letterpress people. ben and i have subscribed to one particular list for longer than we have had the press itself, and have seen the same dumb arguments rear their heads month after month, and the same rigid-on-top, quaking-underneath attitudes try (whether they realize it or not) to scare "newbies" out of the way.
i have lurked, and read, and seen time and time again a post where some fresh new face says, "you know what? i think you people WANT to see letterpress die with you. i think you want to be the LAST of the bunch, and i think you want to ensure that you ARE the last of the bunch by making the experience unpleasant for anyone else who tries it."
(pretty good huh? yeah -- that sentiment actually came from people who were NOT me!)
once, a new letterpresser -- who had just finished handsetting and printing his own wedding invitations, of which he was very proud -- provided a URL for the listserve, so others could go see what he had done.
some of the "master craftsmen" (more than one, in fact) went to that URL and then posted to the list about the HORRIBLE typeface that had been used in the invitations. one individual actually suggested that the letterpressing groom would have done the world a bigger service by melting the type down for scrap rather than letting it live on in his wedding invites.
really heartbreaking.
mind you, these old-timers get things wrong too. sometimes they are bombastic enough to post a link to an image featuring something of their own making, and what do you know -- a big ol' superfluous apostrophe, just hanging out there like a third nipple. maybe one person will have the balls to post to the list about it. but there will be no clever rejoinder. just a fade to black, while you feel the perpetrator tick away the moments until he can be the one pointing fingers again.
what makes me even sadder is when someone who is newer to the "world" of letterpress seems interested not only in printing, but, in fact, making themselves a part of the action by desperately trying to put across their own faux-mothbally version of a "master letterpressman" personality. "look at me! i'm a cantankerous luddite too!" blah blah blah.
the whole world's a fifth grade cafeteria table.
actually, better analogy: you know that scene in planet of the apes where the elder states-apes discover charlton heston has made, practically without thinking, a paper airplane that can actually fly? and although they themselves have never seen the likes of it, and are amazed -- they crumple it up, terrified that anyone else should ever know of it, and throw it in the wastebasket?
that's the general feel.
i posted to the list once or twice with a question, in the beginning, and was given the smackdown because of my use of -- have you noticed it? -- all lowercase letters. just so insulting, you know, to address people who really care about typography in all lowercase letters.
one kind man e-mailed me off list to let me know that these folks were tough -- and he felt for me -- and hey, it was OKAY to use all lowercase letters -- as long as i could admit that the only reason i was doing it was to get on other people's nerves.
i had what i thought were a few polite academic questions for the man, who clearly considered himself to be an "insider" on the list doing me a big favor. with each question i asked, i got more curious and asked another, and within about five exchanges, this man was a drooling, tantrum-throwing baby. i felt sorry for his wife.
lower case letters! that's all!
wondering how offensive i really had been, i started to do a little research. turns out i am not the only one who does it. (for the record, i use all-lowercase in electronic communications such as blogging and e-mail, but nowhere else. i don't think about it, but i do it consistently.) in fact, i was soon to find, one of the founding designers and professors of the bauhaus movement, herbert bayer, had some radical ideas about lowercase-only usage, too. bayer also apparently made acceptable the concept of the "ragged right" margin in some settings.
for the record, the KNITTING TAROT book -- even the titling on the deck itself, now that i think of it -- employs neither lowercase-only type nor ragged right margins.
and i think that's just capital, and completely justified.
why? because i can do whatever the frig i want.
people still talk about it, though, both on the letterpress listserve and off.
about a year ago, i was reading the daily list digest and saw a post from a brand-new letterpresser in the philadelphia area. her question to the list was very hesitant -- she seemed to have sniffed them out pretty accurately. i e-mailed her off list, and it wasn't long before she and her partner were hanging out with us in south philly, eating vietnamese food, talking letterpress.
she'll be here apprenticing on the back-of-card printings for the deck. every single card has a printed back, you know, and we are printing only four cards to a page. this back-of card image will be printed literally thousands of times.
i'm going to set kathy up with it, say good luck, and lock her in here. i'm going out to dinner or something. hell, i might even go to europe. she'll still be working when ben and i get back.
here are some pictures of the new 30" blade guillotine. as kathy said, "finger cuttin' good".
much behind-the-scenes work goes into this kind of a project. ("this kind" of a project... hey, if anybody else out there has EVER letterpressed hundreds of original tarot decks, PLEASE e-mail me). hours of work happens just doing stuff like sizing electronic images, filling out forms, ordering stuff, putting stuff away when it gets here. making abstract plans.
ben, being a "business services" kind of guy, has a neat computer application that allows us to plan every aspect of the project and see what kind of hours are going to be necessary -- and also allows us to allot "work days" for ourselves, as well as hours for our little helper elves, to see how long certain things are going to take. creating this "project plan" has been pretty fun, in that i generally sit and do blackwork embroidery and drink coffee and say "is it done yet?" while ben works on it, and that's fun.
in addition to the project plan, other formal administrative documents are coming into existence: such as some "personas" illustrating what the "average" KT friend needs and wants in the way of a deck and book (this information determined by a random poll sent out months ago to a number of folks on the list); a "scope and vision" document used to determine what makes a "standard" book-and-deck set "standard" and what makes "deluxe" "deluxe"; and a road map of adjuct projects such as notecards, etc., featuring KT illustrations, the best way to work them into the schedule, and who is coming over to help out with them. (we have many talented friends with talented hands, and people who said "i'd love to practice my japanese handbinding techniques" were definitely invited faster than folks who said, "hey, i'll come and 'help' if you give me a free deck!" go figure.) so you see, we're pretty organized. heck, we even have numerous flow charts!
aside from all the abstract planning, we have been waiting with real anticipation for hundreds of pounds of paper to arrive, so that we may begin printing. also, we are waiting for our nice new murderous-shiny guillotine paper cutter. that's coming today. the paper -- or at least some of it -- is here. my UPS guy, who has been my buddy for years, appears to feel very differently about me since about six o'clock last friday. hopefully it's just a mood and will pass.
one may well ask, "where will they keep all this stuff?" luckily, right now, there is a good bit of this house that we never actually use. eventually, it will become a small apartment to rent out -- but for now, what was once a kitchen in a third floor mother-in-law suite is now KT central. as you see, it's not much to look at, and it's empty, but it's not going to be empty for long. this is your "before" shot.
one may well ask, "what's it like, in that house, printing that stuff hour after hour?" the answer is: quiet. well, sometimes. not today, the day of our maiden voyage. ben is working from home due to the snowstorm, and court tv will be on quite a bit due to the michael jackson case's opening statements being made today. court tv is my best buddy during the work week.
also, i think i'll be listening to music a lot more than i do when i'm writing. currently in the changer:
richard cheese, "i'd like a virgin"
rufus wainwright, "want two"
erik satie: works for piano
the very best of blue note jazz
devo's greatest hits
i'll happily keep this blog updated on the KT printing soundtrack so you too can "live the experience"... at home!
so, this really is it; the day we will begin printing the actual cards that will be wrapped into decks and sent off into the world. all the testing and futzing has lead up to the actual doing, and a few sample cards are scattered around the first floor, and we like them.
you may, if you go and look, notice a little sprucing of the notsoswift entry page as well as of the store; that's our spring cleaning. nothin' new on the store, though. and yeah -- shirts and stuff are over. never say never, but definitely say over.
the first mention of the KT was made on my knitting blog on september 30, 2003. just for the record.
well then. i'm off.
for the KT book itself, we needed some "extra" illustrations to augment the illustrations from the deck: illustrations for pages between sections, or pages that might have otherwise been too many blanks in a row. when i asked megan to do one of these, this is what she came up with.
it occurred to us that this little lounging figure was in fact the same little girl who had been conjured to model SUN tee shirts a few months ago:
we decided that this little person is your official emissary for the KT, and her name is agatha. you will doubtless be seeing more of her!
Where the morning-report school succeeds is in its stenographic fidelity. Where it fails is in affording the breath of life to its morning reports.
-- Nelson Algren, Nonconformity
all the "little" projects, like bookplates, bookmarks, notecards and seasonal items -- featuring KT art and text -- are very helpful to us in learning to set type efficiently and well, and to proof, cut, and ultimately to print and to know what we like about printing.
will errors -- both objectively and subjectively defined -- be included in the finished product? a resounding, wabi-sabi, rock and roll yes to that. have we ever seen an error in our almost-finished work and said "eh, just let it go?" no way. i have spent two hours resetting the spacing in a paragraph just for the sake of removing a comma -- a comma so small i could stick five of them up my nose. if i wanted to.
i've said this before, to many, and in various contexts (and in fact it is included in some of the KT text): there are no advanced mistakes. a misplaced letter is gonna be a misplaced letter.
there is nothing more beautiful and brave to me than a work in progress. and a big, multidisciplinary project such as this is very fallible, but also virtually unstoppable, because it is so loved, so heartfelt, and treated so passionately. you can't "download the patch" for a letterpress endeavor; if an error is there, it's there for the long haul.
that said, there is no letter of the alphabet, no space or lack of space, no punctuation mark, that is load-bearing. if the big picture is lost for you based on "imperfection", please go laminate something. i rebuke myself this way sometimes. but not often. and i have folks around who always put things into perspective for me, particularly with their enthusiasm for the project, which continues to astound me. it's the culmination of so many loves, and it's a family affair.
so: "The Quon of Spunbles"? probably not. wait until we become perfect to get our hands dirty with something we love? isn't that the reason so many people do nothing?
i hope this project always encourages others to jump in and create! when you just can't stop yourself, you ARE what brings life to a project. without the freedom to throw everything you can against the wall (while listening to devo and blue note jazz) and see what sticks, we all may as well be nine-to-five drones.
do not fear the misplaced sort (as we call letters and whatnot in letterpress), the dropped stitch, the fumbled touchdown (go eagles), or even the hackneyed phrase in the otherwise heartfelt piece of writing. there's room for it all, as well as the room to improve.
you see here some "doohickies" -- the smallest being about half an inch square -- for use on the front of the cards.
it's been a week of assessing and redirecting for the KT. nothing overwhelming -- we aren't changing our minds and turning the project into a made-for-tv movie instead of a tarot deck -- but we are getting deeper and deeper into the process of the printing itself, which is (as i've noted before) very creator-directed and personal. an absolute nightmare experience this week regarding a KT t-shirt re-order (i guess bootlegged superbowl shirts ARE more important than the KT, in the larger scheme) has us thinking that silkscreened tees and apparel, while fun to have, may have run their course in terms of our amusement here. we must set aside these rather administrative-heavy projects to make way for the letterpress work ahead of us. (i know we had said we would do a sixth item, but it now seems we may not choose to -- although i have another idea about something else non-letterpress that we might try, when our plates are not otherwise so full.)
i'm sure anyone here can relate to that "constipated" feeling with a big creative project. the engravings? a particularly difficult order this week, with all the small pieces. taking a little longer than usual. the type i needed (specifically, one set of parenthetical marks alone was holding me up)? a little backed up at the foundry, due to a "large order from independence hall". (does this have to do with the superbowl as well?) tracking down good deals on paper sources (we did make a decision on that), and no one's calling back. why aren't they calling back? are the eagles bootleggers ordering more paper than we are, too?
well, we were determined to bust through all this planetwide holdup, even if it had to be dog day afternoon style. finally, paper folks started calling back. we'll be getting a better deal than we originally thought, which is great news. the stock we have chosen is magnani pescia in grey. it's a lovely silvery-grey, a very holly golightly grey, putting one in mind of those new martinis they make with finely-pounded pearl dust on the rim of the glass. at 300 grams per square meter, it's a nice solid stock, although not brittle in any way -- it's 100% cotton -- and the color itself will hinder the cards from looking too shabby as thumbings and shufflings commence. and finally, the little engravings showed up, as you see above. so we are back on track in that respect, with the fronts of the SPINDLES court cards in the bed of the press, being properly spaced, titled and ornamented, and tried out for looks.
still waiting on my parenthetical marks.
we must choose a paper stock for the deck itself. while our focus group seems to indicate that the KNITTING TAROT deck is not going to be put to service in any fortune telling parlors, being shuffled multiple times a day, we still want as sturdy a card as you'd see in any art deck.
even when we were cutting paper to test, i knew there was one of the five that wasn't going to please me at all. and i knew i had two clear "favorites". this was all before ink ever touched paper. once i had printed on each paper, i felt my hunches had been justified.
with some of the KT store orders that went out this week, we included samples of each of the four out of five paperstocks that passed muster, with the back-of-card image printed onto them, to see what KT friends thought. (we are always happy to hear input, even if it may not be what we go with in the long run.)
by testing paper stocks we also get a feel for the depth of impression we'd like to use in printing. think of depth of impression as you do gauge in knitting. you may wish to get a gauge somewhat tighter or looser than what is "recommended" -- it's up to you. there's no real "rule", or if there is (unattractive extremes are easy enough to picture), there is plenty of room in which to be "right".
with the exact same engraved "cut", different depths of impression, and different papers and inks, you could make a print that evoked a rather primitive, bold, woodblock print -- or a fine, smooth, elegant wedding invitation, with just a "kiss" of an impression. same engraved cut, same type. many ways to present it. when we choose a paper, we will also be choosing what we want to strive for in impression depth. for the cards, it will be different than for the book itself.
suddenly, paper is as easy to get excited about as yarn ever was.
i'm hardly into the heavy duty phase of composing the type for this project, but i'm making some tests, trying to determine page sizes for the book. the tarot texts will undergo copy- and line- editing while still digital, then be set in 10 point garamond old style, then have proofs taken, and corrections made. each text will then be book-ready.
what you see in the stick here is a few lines of the text from THE EMPRESS. i'm setting it before editing is done because it's one of the longer texts for a card, and i want to see if the longest of the texts (which happens, i think, to be the four of spindles) will fit on the page size i want to use. i received a beautiful hardbound copy of walden from my father at christmastime, with gorgeous woodblock illustrations -- one of a signed edition of 250 -- and i think it is of a size that i would like to mimic for the KT book (i hear it's a pretty good read, too.)
i love composing type, which is a good thing, since i'm going to spend untold hours of 2005 doing just that. at this point, it beats out knitting in my mind, arguably just for the sheer novelty. when composing a line of type, you not only have to get all the letters and punctuation right, but you have to space each word correctly -- a process with many rules and one which can send you back to the drawing board quite a few times. there are quite a few different sizes of spacing materials, and they are used in various combinations. to compare it to knitting, i would say it's like taking a perfectly square or rectangle fair isle chart, and trying to fit it to, say, a teapot or an hourglass or some other nonquadrangle. you would be doing a lot of increasing and decreasing while trying to maintain the integrity of the chart. you would be trying things as you went along in many cases. you would be ripping out.
for an excellent description of the laborious process of composing type -- particularly type one has written oneself -- i recommend reading the short piece "the story of my printing press" by anais nin. a friend mailed a copy of this piece to me when we were just considering getting ludovine, and it really helped seal the deal. the piece is also an important reminder that printing and letterpress are NOT just about the finest papers, the best inks, the most perfect impression. printing and letterpress are about imparting words that may otherwise not be imparted. reading about nin's press and how she printed her book on what was basically throwaway paper, yet set the entire text of the book letter by letter, is very inspiring.
as i've said, we're actually doing the cards in the deck first, and there's some type to be set there as well, in the titling, which will be in 12 point garamond bold. but obviously, far, far more work to do on the book.
not many people are getting knitted holiday gifts from me in 2005.
we said we'd get started printing the deck in january 2005. here it is. and here are the four engraved cuts for the SPINDLES suit court cards.
notice how different in size and proportion each of these "main" images appears. we didn't want the deck to look like a wall full of WANTED posters, with every figure on the deck the same size and distance from the viewer.
on cards where the main image is smaller, there will be ornamentation to fill out the design. some cards -- those with bigger, fuller main images -- may have no ornamentation at all, just the illustration itself, and the titling.
before we will be using these, we will be trying out the engravings for the back of the cards, building the "skeleton" (the combination of metal "blanks" into which the engraved illustrations and type fit, so that cards are printed uniformly), and testing paper stocks for the deck itself.
megan is also working on a set of illuminated drop caps for the book, as well as some illustrations that will be exclusive to the book and not anywhere on any of the cards in the deck.
i am setting type, ordering stuff, and keeping track of receipts.
there you have it! we have launched!
here's hoping everyone had a holiday season that will be pleasant to look back on! the sights, the smells... it is our favorite time of year.
there are three VERY exciting new items in the knitting tarot STORE for this january.
we are offering THE SUN as a childs' tee this january -- in a bright yellow, with red artwork. only the front of these shirts are printed -- there is no tarot text on the backs of them, as with our other shirt and tote designs for adults. these are simple, mod, and adorable!
sizing for kids' shirts includes toddler's 2T through 4T and child's S through XL. all children's tees are $12.00.
as our model indicates -- the kid of your choice will be ten pounds of cute in a five pound bag in one of these babies!
our NEW shirt design is GRAFTING/THE LOVERS. just in time for valentine's day, of course! these are SWEATSHIRTS -- cozy and warm -- in a Lee brand "sueded" sweatshirt. the shirts are a sandstone shade, with red artwork. as with our other apparel designs for adults, the image is on the front and the text and logo are on the back.
a special offer exists for GRAFTING/THE LOVERS sweatshirts: if you buy two, one for you and one for a special partner, there will be a discount for the second shirt. check the store for details.
colors shown for both shirts are approximations.
single-sweatshirt pricing, sizes S through 2X, is as follows:
S through XL: $25
2X: $27
discount pricing for pairs of shirts is as follows:
two regularly priced sweatshirts: $40
one regularly priced and one multiple X $42
two multiple X shirts: $44
for both kids' tees and adult sweatshirts, we will take orders through JANUARY 15 2005 -- then orders for shirts will CLOSE, so that we can get them ready for you in time for st. valentine's day!
and now, our FIRST letterpressed item featuring artwork from the actual KNITTING TAROT deck:
KNITTERS' EX LIBRIS. as knitters, we all know how we value and treasure our knitting and textile books. we look through them with the same reverence we have for family photos, or history; many of our favorites are out of print.
enhance, adorn and personalize your knitting library with beautiful handpressed bookplates featuring the KNITTING TAROT back-of-card design. add the flourish of your own signature and apply with easy-to-use, safe, archival paste *.
the bookplates are printed with black images, and EX LIBRIS text in dark blue, brown, and brick -- on beautiful, acid-free japanese papers. (you will receive bookplates of different ink color combinations and paper types within each order.) with the ink colors and choice of paper for this design, we tried to envoke one of our earliest printing inspirations, the amazing munakata shiko. each bookplate measures approximately 7 x 4.75".
we are offering these bookplates in sets of five for $6.00. quantities are limited and this design will NOT be printed as a bookplate again, so order while you can!
*please attend our BOOKPLATE TUTORIAL before applying your bookplates to your library. bookplating is a dying art -- like trimming hats, scrimshaw, and decent short stories in mainstream magazines. cultivate a taste for it!
the store is OPEN and ready to go. remember, orders for shirts close JANUARY 15. happy shopping! more updates soon!
Everyone, it seems, loves putting buttons up on their blogs. We've put together a special animated button featuring the Knitting Tarot logo, in four smashing designs - and auto-rotating for your viewing pleasure (and that of your visitors.) In case you missed it, here it is again:
Featured prominently on the homepage of the knitting tarot, this animated .gif is free for the taking provided you use the code below to place it on your site.
Simply select and copy all of the code in the text area below, and paste it into the HTML of your blog template or homepage.
Enjoy!
trolling through the images for the deck today, i realized that the prince of spindles and the princess of gauge wouldn't, shall we say, ever have been likely to be seen in the same place together at the same time -- rather like superman and clark kent. so, the prince -- still wearing a skirt, mind you -- has undergone a bit of a makeover. here is the "new guy".
since ludovine is knitting-tarot-exclusive for awhile (but for our holiday card which is being finished up this week), we have turned our minds to some of the particulars of the KNITTING TAROT cards and deck.
we've answered a few very important questions for ourselves. the first of these: what SIZE will the cards in the deck be? the answer: 3 1/2 by 5 3/4. it's a nice big card. using those dimensions, we also zeroed in on a back-of-card design that fits the space perfectly (see above.)
how big will the BOOK be? that's another story. since i wanted to be sure that each text fit onto a single page (with its image on the page opposite), it was necessary to determine which of the texts were the longest, and play with setting those in type first. (still planning to use garamond 10pt.)
our longest text are those for THE WORLD and THE FOUR OF SPINDLES. with that in mind, those will be the texts i set first, and will probably determine the size of the book itself.
meanwhile, we will be using that back-of-card image to determine just how many cards per sheet we will be printing at one time. looks like it's going to be six cards printed at a time in the bed of the press.
here, too, are some new corner doohickies.
it'll be interesting to see those go down to the half-inch square size that they are going to have to be to fit on the cards.
while the backs of the knitting tarot cards will feature one large image alone, the fronts will be a combination of "main" illustrations, text, and mix-and-match pieces of ornamentation.
meg has just started toying with the ornamentation, which i described to her, could be mixed and matched with different cards as we put things into the press. some, of course, would be representative of suits -- needles, skeins, etc. -- but others would just be free-for-all ornaments. i liked these to the elements in the "fashion plates" and "mighty men and monster maker kit" toys she had when she was little (i bet there are plenty of you under-thirty folks who had them, too).
this is the first doohickie. i have kept it in my inbox for a week because i liked looking at it. on a tarot card, it will be oriented differently, and of course there will be one in each corner. i think this would be a fine little tattoo as well!
pour la deuxième fois!
from now through noon on Columbus Day (October 11, 2004)...
"KNITTING TAROT" QUEEN OF SPINDLE T-SHIRTS and SUN TOTE BAGS
and sundry and assorted letterpressed items (not many!)
are for sale!! please go to the store to place your orders! you will find both Knitting Tarot items in the "Apparel" section. the letterpressed items -- "SHEEP BOWLING" cards and Goth Holiday Gift Tags -- are in the "Correspondence and Gifts" category.
YES! this is THE LAST TIME BEFORE THE HOLIDAYS that we will be offering KNITTING TAROT related items! so if you have someone on your list -- or if you are working very hard to get YOURSELF on someone's list -- now is the time to shop!
that is, NOW THROUGH OCTOBER 11, 2004! (at more or less NOON!)
A REMINDER ABOUT SHIPPING: regardless of the shipping method you choose -- whether it's 2-3 day Priority Mail or Special Deluxe Type-A Now Now Now delivery -- it will only be sent that way after we GET the freshly-printed totes and tees back from our special elves, and THAT, dears, will be on or before NOVEMBER 1 2004.
happy shopping! and THANK YOU for your support!
we are currently working on a very small letterpressed book called thanksgiving. i wrote the text, and a friend illustrated it, and we had engravings made of her drawings, and now i have been setting the type and ben did a lot of the scheming as per layout and building the skeleton for the form, and he and i have been printing.
this has nothing to do with the knitting tarot except that this project is about a thousanth the size of that project, and boy, is it hard work. and LONG work. i said to ben today: "i do not see that knitting tarot, both book and deck, can possibly be ready for holiday 2005. it will take twice as long as that to do it right."
"people will wait for it," said ben.
"and if they don't want to," i said, before i even realized that i was speaking, "they can go suck moose c**k."
heavens. they say character is what you do when nobody else is looking. i guess significant others don't count. i really don't want any of our knitting tarot friends to suck moose c**k. i don't. i want them -- us all -- to be happy, enlightened people with unusual, special letterpressed knitting tarot books and decks. we all just may need to wait a little longer than i originally thought.
scrubbing the ink out of tiny lead a's and o's this week has been very enlightening. i've said it before: letterpress in general, and the knitting tarot in particular, just doesn't work as well as a consumer driven endeavor. but that doesn't mean everyone won't benefit in the long run, if they wish to.
i look at the work we have done on thanksgiving over the last few weeks; the hand-numbing, spots-in-front-of-the-eyes work. and i think: put it all in one pile, and one glass of V-8 juice would mean its total demise. at the same time, i'm amazed by it, and how beautiful it is, and how nothing, anywhere, is anything like it, nor will it ever be. and in the grand scheme, even if the number of anything we create is a small number, that so increases the percentage of, well, "love matches" between books/decks and owners, doesn't it?
lots of planning, math, and more planning to do on the knitting tarot before i'm cleaning ink out of any o's.
endeavor to persevere!
we more or less chose colors and text for t-shirts for both the Sun and the Queen of Spindles. (we didn't check in with the place that does our shirts yet on ink colors for these, but we assume they could get it pretty close -- they do work a lot more intricate than ours.)
looking at these, we thought that it might be nice to see ONE of them as a totebag design INSTEAD of a t-shirt. so, with that in mind, there is now an online poll to get your opinions on that as well. (it's a very narrowly directed poll, so if you wanted to get your two cents in about something other than this exact topic, you'd better just e-mail.)
please take the poll IF you were thinking about wanting a Sun or Queen of Spindles item of your own. if you aren't interested in buying, please DON'T take the poll -- we really want the results to reflect the interests of the people putting their money where their mouths are, so to speak.
will we be offering any more designs before the holidays? (i am asking myself as much as anyone is asking me.) i am HOPING we can get one more screen done in addition to these two -- hopefully one featuring a MALE knitter in an illustration from the deck. it only seems right. we'll hope for the best!!
the poll ends this coming MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2004. please get your votes in before that date!!
i think the Sun is so freakin' cute.
I am sure that there are people who doubt that there are seventy-eight different experiences to be had in knitting, much less seventy-eight knitting experiences that can be interpreted into the larger scale of life, or Tarot. When I began writing the text for this deck, I was not entirely sure myself.
The fact that it has been accomplished says, in my opinion, more for Tarot than it does for knitting. Tarot is a tool with which we can break down our experiences into seventy-eight recognizable, universal, bite-sized pieces. It should be applicable to almost anything, attempts to be contrary notwithstanding. Knitting gains no pass-or-fail status by simply being the activity, rather than the tool, through which one can interpret experience. But if you want to see knitting as a metaphor for life, best trust someone who believes that it can be. We are all very biased towards our own disciplines, which is as it should be, if you want to experience the best of those disciplines. When “theatre people” tell you that everything in life is best expressed through theatre, hope that they are right, at least on the night that you are a ticket-holder. When a baker tells you the same thing about bread, get in line for his baguettes.
It was a test for me to see if knitting could be applied to Tarot (or if I was up to the challenge of representing it accurately), but I already knew that Tarot was an accurate tool for application to anyone's life, because Tarot, like gravity, exists whether you believe in it or not. Tarot bridges knitting and life at large, and it will be interesting to see if it makes knitting any more comprehensible to the people who have to live with those of us who do it. Megan, who illustrated the seventy-eight cards, is not a knitter -- but she certainly managed to convey everything she was asked to illustrate. She was able to do this, even though her “knit stitches” don't look anything like real knitting stitches, and her “needles” seem in fact to be arrows and would indeed be impossible to knit with. A drawing of something we already recognize is not what's important here.
For those who have never before used the Tarot, there are plenty of books and word-of-mouth sources to get you started on doing spreads and readings. I myself am satisfied to draw a single card from the Knitting Tarot deck and attempt to apply it to the situation at hand. You may notice, when reading the Knitting Tarot, that not every card -- in fact few cards -- tell you “what to do” when you draw a card. Maybe there is nothing to do, but acknowledge the situation, size it up, and relate it on one's own to the card in hand. If every Tarot text included instruction such as “If you see a card that has sad things on it, look for something in your life that is sad,” that would be pandering. If you want to use your cards as a mirror for your current situation, or a jumping-off point for your next project, or a clue to a puzzle in your knitting life - then that is how you should use them.
In knitting, like in everything else, it is nice to have a second version of ourselves standing next to us, saying loudly and clearly the things that we know, but can't seem to admit, act on, or express. That second self is Tarot. This is the Knitting Tarot.
-- A.D.S.