My Book! London Stitch and Knit

Lately I've been working on a big project that I'm super excited about. I'm writing a book! It's a guide to London's fabric, knitting and haberdashery shops and will be published this autumn. I'm also doing the photos for the book, which is wonderful because I get to go to so many amazing shops and capture how beautiful they are. It's been hard though to keep my wallet from jumping out of my purse at every shop! I've had the idea for the book for a while and I'm really happy that it's now a reality.

I keep a lot of sticky notes on my desktop (too many, what a mess they've become!) and one of those notes is fabric and knitting shops I come across on blogs and various web sites or magazines. I make a note of them so that if I'm planning to go to an area of London that I've not been to before, I can check my sticky note and see if any of those shops are nearby. As the list of shops grew, I thought about how wonderful it would be to have a guide to them, with lots of pretty photos. I hunted around to see if any such guide already existed and came up with nothing. So the idea quickly sprouted into a book proposal!

Of course then I had to figure out how to write a book proposal, but there's tons of information on how to do that online so it wasn't too challenging. I also had a graphic designer friend help me make a beautiful mini-book version to submit with the proposal. I figured the more a publisher could envision the book, the better. Without an agent, I submitted it to four publishers and had four enthusiastic replies. Ultimately Black Dog Publishing was the best home for it. They've done many really beautiful books on art, architecture and crafts.

I designed the current cover for the book, which might change a bit, but the overall style will be what you see above. And below is a teensy peek of what you can expect from some of the photos, and I'm also super happy that Katt Frank will be illustrating a map for the book. I love her work. Just look at how beautiful her illustrations are! I can envision wonderful sewing bits just like her coffee illustration below. I'm so excited. Feel free to follow my instagram for peeks in some of the shops. My blogging might be sparse over the next month or so, but you can see what I'm up to there, if you'd like.