Edited by Anna Torborg
Published by Snowbooks (available on Amazon UK)

I eagerly awaited this book, having heard rumours about it for months in the craft blog world. What a joy, a book about fellow craft bloggers, people whose blogs I visit, whose crafting online lives I feel familiar with, people whose work and crafting skills I constantly envied and who I admired very much. Congratulations to Anna of twelve22 for getting this book together. Fabulous idea and end product.

The book has 17 craft bloggers who, if you have been craft blogging for a while, will be very familiar to you (the list of contributers is here). Each craft blogger has a chapter to herself, discussing such topics and why we create and what we are inspired by. There is a peak into their work practice and space and a project. There are some really lovely projects from the very simple to the complex and all inbetween (some projects here to wet your appetite).

This book is not only a good project book and insight into other crafters but is an inspirational read.

Anna answered a few questions for me about this book:

1. When did you start to think about the book?
It was either very late September or October of 2005. My boss, Em, and I were walking around Borders in Islington, and I was trying to think of a way that a craft book could get on promotion (those tables at the front of the store). The original idea for the Crafter’s Companion was to have a text-heavy craft book the size of a regular (B Format) paperback. Something that people could take with them on the train. Obviously the format changed over time, but the original idea – a craft book that people could sit down and read – remained the same.

2. Working at a publishing house was very handy for you, but how hard did you have pitch the idea to get it started to your publishers?
Well, you have to realize that Snowbooks is comprised of five people, really, and only four of us came into the office each day. We’re very small, but we do everything in house, so that gives us a great ability to create exactly what we want.

I always knew that the rest of the Snowbooks gang would let me down gently if they didn’t think it was worth our time, but as luck would have it, they were positive from the get-go.

3. How did you come up with the list of contributors? did you have specific requirements they had to meet when you were thinking about who to include?
The main requirement was that they were sewers, so that ruled out quite a few pure knitters, etc. I knew I wanted the book to focus on sewing projects, as that’s my main craft. At the time, there were already loads of clever knitting books, but sewing hadn’t quite caught up in terms of modern, stylish pattern books. We were all inspired by the Japanese books, of course, and I wanted to create something along those lines.

Beyond the sewing element, there wasn’t really a rhyme or reason to the people I contacted. I e-mailed many more people than appear in the book, and some were just too busy to join in; others I never heard back from. The hardest thing was that new blogs appear every day, but I had to set my list in stone eventually, thereby cutting out a lot of the newer bloggers we all love.

4. did you test all the patterns yourself?
I had a few different people review the patterns – some experienced sewers and others not. I didn’t physically test them myself (we’d still be waiting for me to finish!), but I did do all the illustrations for the patterns, so I had to be very clear on what was happening in each step. The pattern reviewers gave me thumbs up when the patterns were correct and alerted me to possible changes when they ran into problems. If there’s anything I’m still worried about, it’s that people might find the illustrations confusing or that I’ll have assumed instructions were complete enough when there was actually room for more explanation. Time will tell.

5. are you planning on a sequel?
I don’t like to say anything about projects until they’re well underway. I’ll definitely be doing more craft books with Snowbooks, including Kerrie Allman’s book about hand painted yarn (October 2007). There won’t be a sequel to Crafter’s Companion in the strictest sense – although there’s room for it in our bloggy world, I don’t think the general market needs another. But I’m planning a sort of continuation of it, if you will. . . the next step. And I’m trying to plan my own book of patterns – a total vanity project, but if I get positive responses to the designs, I’ll just have to stamp down on my humility.

6. Do you have a favourite project in the book?
Now, what kind of book mother would I be if I admitted to that! No, I don’t think I do have a favourite project, because they’re all so different. I think everybody will find something they can make from the book, whether it’s a simple project to build confidence or quite a complicated one for a new challenge.

7. Did the contributors give you a couple of different projects to choose from or did you request something specific from each of them or did you just get what you got and had to go with it?
I requested that projects be sewing-focussed and that they be practical items – something the reader can actually use once they’ve made it. The contributors submitted their ideas over e-mail first, so we had time to decide who would be doing what before they fired up their sewing machines.

8. Did contributors take all the photos themselves? or did they send their projects to you to have professionally photographed? What were the requirements with images and was quality control difficult with so many contributors?
Contributors sent me a number of photos they’d taken themselves, and these appear in each woman’s section. They also sent me their finished projects, which I photographed.

Having photos come from so many different sources actually was one of the biggest ‘problems’ I had to overcome – how could I create cohesion with all those different photos? I think having a solid layout – a frame that remained more or less the same through the book – helped to give the book a uniform look. Once I started designing the book, there was never any question about the need for all the photos. They really make the book what it is!

9. Is there potential for craft bloggers to get a book published with Snowbooks? What is the process for submitting manuscripts? Are you looking for specific topics at the moment?
Well, I’m a bit hesitant to say ‘yes,’ because I don’t want to make it seem easier than it is. But yes, there’s as much an opportunity for craft bloggers to get published with us as there is for anybody – it’s all down to the book in the end. We’re definitely not a vanity publisher, so the quality and originality has to be there.

The scary thing for me about publishing craft books is that they come to me as ideas rather than fully-formed manuscripts (as a novel would). An idea can be good, but I have to be able to trust that the author will follow through on that idea – in a timely manner, as well! If you’re ready for your book idea to become a huge chunk of your life while it’s in production, then submit away! There are guidelines on our website (http://www.snowbooks.com/).