Three is the magic number

In February and May I talked about the first two Knitter’s Curiosity Cabinet books.  it was unreasonably fun to go back and reminisce a bit about making them, and so I wanted to be sure to talk a bit about Volume III as well.

Just like last time, I’ve put both the paper book and the electronic book on sale for 25% off and made the individual patterns available on ravelry (normally it’s only the whole book that’s available).  You don’t need a code or anything, the prices are already changed.  They’ll be that way through the end of the month, and then they’ll go back to normal and the individual patterns will disappear.

So the first of these books used botanical prints.  That was easy enough.  Everyone likes pretty plants.  And the second one used prints of butterflies.  Again, easy enough.  I know lots of folks aren’t crazy about bugs, but most of us will totally give butterflies a pass.  But finding the subject for volume three was tricky.

I thought about birds.  There are some lovely illustrations of birds (and, somewhat unexpectedly, of eggs) out there.  But it was a bit hard to track down enough illustrations with enough variety to do what I had in mind.

I thought about doing bugs.  I’d come across some astonishingly beautiful drawings of beetles as I’d sourced images for the other books, and I was mightily tempted.  But I worried that, while folks might let me get away with butterflies, bugs in general might be a bit too much.

I thought about doing rocks.  Yes, really.  I’m awfully fond of rocks, and there are some marvelous illustrations to be had.  But again, it just didn’t quite click.

Then finally, I stumbled on the idea of doing sea creatures.  I admit, it was surprising at first.  You hear sea creatures and think fish (and if you’re me, you think fish and go ‘eww, no’).

But the more I looked, the more I found.There were algae and shells and jellyfish and kelp and coral and all manner of lovely things.  I pretty quickly realized I could get through the whole thing without using even a single fish.

Once I had that sorted, everything else just fell into place.  By this point I had my team, and I knew what the schedule for a book looked like.  It all just came together like magic, and I couldn’t be happier with the result!

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