I got an email very late last night from the printing company that’s printing my book, querying four pages where they had found problems. One of the problems I had checked for already, so I’m not sure how it slipped through, but obviously it did!
The other 3 problems were things that I had not noticed and am very pleased that they picked up.
I love having such thorough printers. While I don’t want to have to rely on them to pick up problems like these, I am glad that I can!
The pages have been corrected and are currently resending. 
Over the next few days I have to get stuck into some class proposals. I’ve had a few letters over the past months asking for class proposals, but just haven’t had the chance to do anything about them. Thankfully the submission dates have not yet passed.
These are for classes into 2013, which seemed such a long way off when we were in 2011, but now I guess its not really all that far away!
 Elizabethan panel I’ll be submitting a range of proposals, including Portuguese Whitework, Mountmellick, and do you remember the Elizabethan style embroidery I did for fun a few years ago? I’m also thinking of doing a small one-day class proposal using some of those techniques.
So this means that apart from sorting through projects already made for classes to see which ones I’d like to teach again, I’m just going to *have* to design and make a small Elizabethan project in the next few days. Oh what a dreadful chore! (wink!)
I spent a bit of time on Friday and Saturday working on a video preview of “Portuguese Whitework”. It’s been quite fun.
I have no idea about video – my brain designs better in two dimensions – even though I did some really basic stuff at uni when I did my design degree. At the time I decided video wasn’t really for me. However, I am enjoying the challenge of making the video!
My husband and I chose some music for it the other night. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed about the music, because looking for some royalty-free music to use was also something I had never done before. We found some websites where these sorts of things are available, and searched through the ones with “Portugal” or “Portuguese” amongst their keywords. Found some lovely classical guitar type pieces, and eventually whittled it down to the one that works best with my video. I’ll probably purchase the music today.
I also need to speak with my shipping agent today to work out when the books are likely to get here, so that I can set a release date. The printer has given me a shipping date, but I just need my shipping agent to give me an idea of how long it might take to get to Sydney, through the dock system and customs.
Its all happening here!
Yesterday afternoon my daughter and I drove to the Post Office (yes, drove! – that’s a new one for me!) and I posted off the printouts and files of “Portuguese Whitework” to my printers in Hong Kong.
Just quietly, it doesn’t feel as marvellous as I might have expected, to have it finished, possibly because I wasn’t feeling all that stressed about it beforehand. I was just working solidly to get it done.
However, I am sure that over the next few days and weeks I will really feel the difference of not having to rush off to my computer for every spare second to get more work done. I am looking forward to being a little more detached from the computer!
However, now I can get stuck into updating the website and putting it there so that people can pre-order it. But the thing I am really looking forward to, is making a video preview of the book. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I am looking forward to the challenge.
I’ll also have to decide which of my other book ideas is the best one to focus on next. Its a bit hard to decide! But the decision can just percolate for a bit yet. I’m happy to have a little break!
Thank you to you all for your encouragement, and for those who have let me know how much they’ve enjoyed hearing about the process of writing and publishing a book. There’s still more stages of the printing process to go through, so I’ll probably be able to tell you about them also.
I spent about 10 hours yesterday reading through the printouts of the book again. And finding lots more little things to fix…
At the beginning of the day I was thinking to myself “Oh, I’ll let that one go. It’ll be ok” but then I thought to myself “No! This is my chance to get it right! I am going to fix those things.” So fix them, I did.
I now have another set of printouts that I will read through today. Hopefully it won’t take me 10 hours again! So hopefully it will be posted today?
I woke this morning from a bit of a nightmare. I dreamt that I had travelled about 8 hours into the country for a class. I turned up for the class and in the few seconds before it was due to start, I realised that *I* was meant to be teaching it! As it was a Mountmellick class, I was supposed to have brought kits with me, and prepared a workshop. It was rather awkward as I stood there explaining to the class that because I had been so caught up in finishing off the book I forgotten to do it. Thankfully they were all very nice about it and because we were in a fabric shop, we made do with the supplies there and had a slightly chaotic class instead. I’m so glad it was only a dream!
Can you tell this book is just slightly weighing on me?!
I am hoping to send off my files for Portuguese Whitework to the printer today. That will depend on how I go with reading through and checking the entire book. I’ve made all the changes that my husband found the other day and had it printed out again.
Hopefully I will find very little this time through.
I’m SOOOOOOOO close…!
I got a message from Lisa from Canada just recently, saying that she was going to be in Sydney at the beginning of February and would we like to meet up? Coming to the end of the book, I’m all for the idea of having some “play” time after all this hard work, so I figured it sounded like an excellent idea.
Lisa and I are going to meet up on Thursday 2nd February at the Powerhouse Museum, to see the Love Lace exhibition, and we’d like to invite anyone else who’d like to come along to join us!
I still have to figure out where we will meet, because the museum’s entry and forecourt are undergoing a bit of a renovation at the moment. But I will figure out somewhere and let you all know. Wherever it is, we will meet at 10:15. I have to be back home by mid afternoon, so we’ll probably finish up around 1, 1:30ish, but you’re welcome to stay on. You don’t have to leave just because I do!
The general entry fee for the Powerhouse Museum is $12 for adults, and $8 for concession. I am pretty sure that the Love Lace exhibition is included in this price. (The Harry Potter exhibit is not!)
If you’d like to join us, let me know, and we will know to look out for you at our meeting place. I’ll let you all know where we’re going to meet when I’ve figured something out.
It’d be great if you’d perhaps bring some of your current embroidery (if its not too big!) so that we can all share about what we’re currently working on. I might be able to bring the printouts of the book…!
I nearly forgot to write my blog post this morning – I just got straight onto working on the book!
On Saturday I finally finished what I call my “first draft”. For anyone else writing a book, this would mean that the author had finished getting all the words out of their head and onto paper. It is relatively early in the book writing process. That’s not what *I* mean though.
Most authors write in a word processing program, and then the designer takes their words and puts them into the page layout. Because I am both the author and the designer, I write directly onto my page layout, in the design program that I use (QuarkXpress).
This means that my “first draft” includes all the words, photos, and diagrams (or at least an indication of what photos or diagrams are going to go where). If you’re familiar with my books, you’ll know that due to the step by step nature of the instructions, the text is completely intertwined with the pictures. Often, to make it fit, I need to massage the words and layout of pictures a lot to edit them into shape and make it work. So for me, a completed “first draft” means there is something on EVERY page, but it will already have undergone a significant editing process to get to that stage.
I took a long time to complete my first draft because there were some pages that were completely empty until Saturday. As soon as they were done, it felt a little more finished.
I went to my local office supplies place and got them to print it all out for me (much quicker than troubling my poor little laser printer with it!). I finally held some semblance of this book in my hands for the first time. Wow!
It has now been handed over to my proofreader for checking. My husband is my proofreader. He is very meticulous, likes words, yet knows very little about embroidery, so he comes to the work with a fresh, non-understanding brain. If he can understand the instructions, a stitcher should certainly be able to! If he can’t, then I need to make it so that he can.
Thankfully, he hasn’t found huge amounts that need significant work. Mostly it is just small changes. But it is a really important step, as he sees things that I don’t see, because I am over-familiar with it.
When he’s written all over it, I get the pages back again and work through the things he wants me to change. I get to decide what changes and what doesn’t. However, if he thinks something needs fixing, it probably does!
So that’s what I’m working on today. I will hopefully also find the time to go and get my pattern pages and the cover printed out, so that they can also be checked.
Elder Daughter has been reading “Swallows and Amazons” recently, and decided that she’d like to camp out in the back yard as a bit of an adventure. We’ve borrowed a tent from my parents for this.
Dad came around yesterday to show us how to put the tent up – he said it wouldn’t be intuitive. We did a test run and it went up just fine, but I can’t imagine we would have figured it out without him! The girls enjoyed getting inside the tent and imagining the possibilities.
We only have a small backyard, and much of it is taken up by garden and the swing-set. So we tucked the tent in an area that we noted would have a water frontage if we had a downpour. (We have had so much rain here this summer that the ground is full of water, and if it rains there are parts of the yard that become ponds quite quickly!)
We considered having the sleep out last night, but realised that we still need to organise mattresses to sleep on, so down came the tent again in preparation for our mower man coming today.
Last night at about 10pm, a huge electrical storm came over. It was terribly close, with lightning and thunder following VERY close on its heels. The rain thrashed down, and at one stage we thought we might have heard small hail. I’ve just heard a report on the radio that we got about 27mm (about an inch) of rain in this area!
So I’m very glad we didn’t go camping last night. The position we had the tent in would have indeed filled up with water. I can imagine there would have been some wet bodies seeking shelter in the safety of the house! And the girls aren’t real fond of electrical storms so I can’t imagine they would have agreed to staying out in one!
We’ll find another night to have our holiday sleep out.
In the meantime, the book keeps getting closer and closer.
I’ve been working hard filling pages of the book. Currently there are only two pages that are yet to have anything put on them. One is a chapter opener that I need to take a photo for, and one is a fairly simple step-by-step instruction page.
Once they’re done, the first draft will be complete. I have already moved on to editing some of the other pages. It is lovely to be at the stage where I am checking all the project instructions, doing really fiddly typographical things (yes, I enjoy this! I am a book designer at heart, seeing that is what I trained as!) and just generally editing the pages.
I had a fun time the other day putting the photos of the historical examples in place. Wow, they look fantastic! It makes a wonderful start to the book, really helping you to get a feel for the historical background of this style of embroidery.
In the slightly paraphrased words of a “They Might be Giants” song, “and now we’re even closer, and now we’re even closer. And now we’re closer still…”
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White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations quality needlework books and embroidery products. You can see turn-the-page previews of my books at
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