Publication Date and a trip to Wales

Without further ado, I am delighted to announce that A Stitch in Time Volume 2 will be published on 25th October (in two weeks time).

An email has gone out to all pre order customers which advises that orders will be despatched in order of them being placed, so earliest order first. Wholesale orders will be going out in much the same way and then its over to the stores to deliver how they see fit. UK orders could take up to about a week to be received therefore, and depending on the individual country's postal service I would allow three to four weeks for delivery overseas. We'll also be taking the pre order special price off the website at the end of this week so the price will be going up to its full price from Monday. So if you would still like to take advantage of the pre order offer for a few more days, now is the time to do it.

So a couple of days ago, Gavin and I set off through the countryside to meet with the lovely printing firm who are printing the book for us. The pages of the book were being printed 16 pages to one sheet of paper, so 8 pages to each side of paper. With 400 pages to the book that means 25 separate 'sets' of 16 pages. This doesn't sound so much until you see all spread out in front of you!

Copyright Susan Crawford 2011

Where the chap is at the far end of the row is the other end of the book and it is all the piles that you can see. I almost burst into tears as we walked around the corner and saw it spread out in front of us.

And it wasn't just the number of piles

Copyright Susan Crawford 2011

It was all the sheets piled up too!

We were given a guided tour of the factory and shown the enormous press that our book was being printed on

Copyright Susan Crawford 2011

Each one of these sections prints one of the four colours needed, the paper is turned over and the process is repeated on the other side. Every stage of the process is followed by cameras so that the print machine operators can check every single page as it passes through the press. The firm is very enviromentally active and have won all manner of awards and accreditation for their efforts to reduce waste and work in an enviromentally friendly way - their canteen even has a wormery for all kitchen waste! All the paper used is FSC approved and of particular interest to me, the inks used are vegetable based. This was common practice in the past but inks became chemical based over the last 60 years or so which has an impact on the enviroment in various ways. I was keen to find a printer who used vegetable based inks so was delighted when this was the case. My other concern was that the printer would be reasonably near to ourselves. So although not on the doorstep, they are only 4 hours away and with the book binders being used only an hours trip from the printers, the amount of travelling the books have to do before they reach us is minimal.

Here are a few more images of our book 'curing' before it leaves the printers to have its beautiful hard back case wrapped around it.

Copyright Susan Crawford 2011

Copyright Susan Crawford 2011

Copyright Susan Crawford 2011

I think most of the images are just about blurry enough to keep you all guessing!

for now
Ruby xx