… when the original Woolly Thoughts was published … and a lot has happened since then.
It is very confusing because everything we do is called Woolly Thoughts but it was originally just this garish pink book.
In 1994 we somehow persuaded Souvenir Press to publish a knitting book that had no colour in it and this was the result.
In 2007 I wrote a book, called Picking Up Threads, about how Woolly Thoughts came about and what happened in the years after its publication.
I have now put the entire document on the Woolly Thoughts web site. You can read it here. Be warned – it is very long.
This is my original description of Picking Up Threads:
It all started with a question on an Internet knitting list: ‘How do you know when you’ve arrived in knitting?’. I couldn’t find a simple answer and my thoughts, which are still inconclusive, led me to write this book.
The three main threads – Mathematics, Knitting and the rise and rise of Information Technology – have combined with the effects of a chronic illness to lead me to where I am now. It is my story – or part of it – dominated by the creations that have evolved on the way and the experiences they have led me into such as using basic Mathematics with small children to mammoth events with 10,000 people in a football stadium, running workshops in an Italian palace with the assistance of a simultaneous translator and my new bathroom featuring on television.
If you thought knitting was boring, think again!
The story ends in 2007 but a great deal more has happened since then. I suspect this may be because I joined Ravelry in 2007 and much of what we have done is documented there. The history of all the afghans we have made, up to the present day, can be found in Afghan Stories.
The original book eventually went out of print. We saw books changing hands for vasts amounts of money. Fortunately, a new edition was published by Dover Publications (who, at that time, mostly published out-of-copyright books and books by dead authors). The advantages of this are that the price is much lower and it will stay in print ‘forever’. The disadvantage is that authors don’t get royalties. We were happy to agree to that as it made the book accessible to anyone.
The only difference in the new version is that it was all shrunk down slightly and the page with the ‘accurate’ squares is no longer accurate.
To read about why we didn’t want to use colour jump to page 6b
To read about the event in the football stadium jump to page 18d
To read about the Italian palace jump to page 25d
To read about how our bathroom came to appear on television jump to page 26a