I LOVE encouraging peopleĀ to use their art as a base for a book.
Imagine giving your friends and family a booklet of your art work for Christmas.
These days, when ‘publish on demand’ is so easy (and gets easier by the minute), there is no excuse Not to.
And that, ends ‘the lecture,’ and begins my sharing:
“The First Time I Saw the Ocean/Mayan & Richard Ward” was my first fiction book (available on Amazon). It started with my husband, exercising and looking at my knitted pictures on the walls. He said it felt like a story of a little girl visiting Meher Spiritual Center for the first time. Once I started writing, it went very fast. All I had to do was follow theĀ knittedĀ pictures I had, and let them tell the story. The only thing missingĀ was a knitted picture of an alligator (which I then made justĀ for the book). T=So the process was that the knitting led meĀ intoĀ writing.
If you have enough images in your knitting/embroidery/needlepoint/painting, you can do the same: assemble what you have, organize it in order that tells a story, and start writing. Insert the images here and there in your writing, and yourĀ book is done!

‘Mixed Tapestries‘, our new book, follows the opposite process. First I wrote a short story in the middle of the night (well, 5 am), then I started knitting the illustrations for it. Where and how the idea started, I do not know, but it evolved to a new knit technique for me. I wrote more about it in my previous post.Ā This is the finished series (sorry it’s from right to left) :

The technique, ‘7 yarns’ or ‘3+1+3’ uses the same 7 yarns through the whole piece, but always using one of them, as a separator, in the middle to create the image. It’s not that complicated. Once you knitĀ 2-3 rows of the image, all yarns should be in place and from there on it’s straight forward (click on the fish to see the pattern).

And back to the lecture: do something, don’t wait, your art is unique and has your special flavor. God made you precisely as you are, give back by showing your work (and not puttingĀ it into a drawer).
Good Luck.
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