Ethnic Knitting Exploration arrives! (FINALLY!)

Yesterday we got the call: Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting Exploration had arrived at the freight dispatch center. Delivery was scheduled for between 10 a.m. and noon today. The good news: timing was such that my daughter would be around to help.

At 12:02, the truck pulled up in front of the house.

We'd already cleared the driveway and spent an hour making space for 35 more cartons of books in the garage and basement. This truck had a lift gate, so we didn't need to make a bunch of trips from the curb with the hand truck, moving a few cartons at a time. Using a pallet jack, the driver slid the whole pallet onto the gate, lowered the gate, and then took the pallet off at just the right angle. He and my daughter pushed the pallet up the incline to a spot next to the garage door.

Then my daughter unwrapped the pallet.

Books that arrive on a pallet end up in much better shape than cartons that arrive separately. The wrap and the pallet really protect the copies. Of course, we need to be getting at least a few hundred pounds of books to warrant a pallet. We ship books to distributors as well as to ourselves, so we're often close on qualifying for pallet transport.

Still, these boxes are heavy and have come a long way, being managed en route by heavy equipment.

Interestingly, once I got into the boxes (and I always check any cartons that show visible damage), only one book had actually been messed up.

This book has been so complicated to get to press, because of massive electronic problems, that I've been apprehensive about what it would look like. I also worked with two inks (a blue and the usual black), sometimes in combination, and there's no way to tell for sure what the results of any color work will look like until they're printed for real.

So I asked my daughter to open a box and check out a copy and let me know what she thought.

She told me it was safe to look.

The blue's a little brighter than we expected, but we think it's a success!

Now, of course, this product of several years' work starts moving out into knitters' hands to see what they think. It should be showing up in yarn shops and bookstores in the next couple of weeks. We shipped cartons off to the wholesalers before the last UPS, FedEx, and USPS pickups for the day.

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Ethnic Knitting Exploration features raglan, circular yoke, and saddle-shoulder sweaters with designs and techniques from Lithuania, Iceland, and Ireland. There are three small projects on which to practice skills and colors: fingerless gloves, a capelet, and a poncho. All are presented with worksheets that let readers design unique sweaters.

Added in the evening: better photos of the book itself.

Cover:

Title page (that's the one dinged up copy I'm using as a model; you can see its crumpled corner):

And contents, which will be posted more legibly on our new website as soon as we figure out how to clarify international shipping costs through PayPal (makes our heads hurt to try to figure out something fair and universally applicable):

I've got to say that there's really nice introductory coverage of cables in this book that clarifies some basics it's normally hard to get a handle on. Among other great info.