Editing

I have to admit until I wrote my book I never realised what a time consuming job editing is.  It feels like the editing has taken much longer than the writing of the book itself!  My book is just short of 250 pages, and I have now read it from cover to cover at least 6 times in the last few months, some sections it feels like I know them word by word!  We started around the start of April and only finished editing a couple of weeks ago.

The red pen got a lot of use!

Because my book is so large we've been working through a section at a time.  My editor, Edd, goes over the section on his computer, adding in notes where he would like me to add/take away/change the text and asking questions.   I then get sent the whole section printed up on A3 sheets with lots of white space around the outside so I can write my edits and responses to his questions in.

It takes a lot of concentration reading over again and again to make sure the text makes sense, that it sounds right when reading and that there's no typos.  Then in the later stages of editing I was also looking at the layout and the design of each page to.

For me this has been the hardest stage of the book, I can quite happily write for days but found the editing draining and tiring.  However now it's all done, and the illustrations have been added in and the page layout sorted it looks amazing!  I am so incredibly proud of the book, and amazed at how good Search Press have made it look.

New cover

The last couple of weeks have been spent deciding on the cover, as much as I loved the illustrations on the first cover I think this new cover is really colourful and eye catching which should help it stand out in the shops.   What do you think?  Do you like it?

It's now only a few short months before I will have a copy of the book in my hands, and it will be in the shops.  I am really starting to get excited now!  The book was originally due to be published at the end of November but Search Press are trying to bring it forward to the end of September, so hopefully in a couple of months time the book will be here!  If you'd like to pre-order the book is now on Amazon here, so you can take advantage of their pre-order guarantee.

In my next post I'm going to tell you a bit more about the content of the book and who has contributed to it.

New sewing room at last!

6 weeks after moving in I have finally gotten my sewing room sorted!  Only phone pics below I'm afraid so not the best quality but you'll get the gist of how it looks.  My sewing room is basically half of my bedroom.  I used an Ikea room divider shelving unit to separate off the bedroom side of the room from the sewing room side.  This does mean that both halves of the room are pretty small but I wanted to keep all my sewing things separate, don't want to be finding needles in the bed at night!

The room divider

I've made the sewing room the side by the window, with my desk right under the window so I have lots of natural light.  Plus there's a lovely view out of the window.

View from my sewing desk

Sewing desk

My sewing table is actually two £10 desks from Ikea, they are only hardboard but look and feel pretty sturdy.  For £10 each you can't go far wrong!  I wanted to have one for sewing on and one for cutting on.  In my old house I had to push the machine back to cut on the front of the desk which was a pain.  The only downside of how I've set the room up is the sockets are behind the shelves to the left of the desk, not too sure how I'm going to get an extension lead in but I will be trying at the weekend.

I've got all my sewing books right to hand, although I do have to crawl under the able to get to some of them!  Most my haberdashery is on those shelves beside the desk too, and some on the shelves behind (the two bookcases join in an L shape).  I do miss having desk drawers to keep my habby in but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

To the right of the desk I have my brilliant rainbow drawers, they are full of fabric.  They are labelled to say which colour of fabric, or type of fabric is in each.  I've also got the ironing board there but I think I need to find somewhere to leave it open ideally, and there's no socket by there so it might have to go in the bedroom side of the room.  The boxes on top of the drawers have all my stationery in.What you can't see is to the far right, beside the filing cabinet I have a stack of the boxes like the one on top of the filing cabinet, full of fabric!

It is amazing how much stuff you can fit into these shelves, plus I have things stacked up on top too.  They are good for getting lots of things into a small space.  It total the area I have for the sewing room is around 5ft x 7-8ft.  There is an awful lot of fabric and sewing books squeezed into that space!

I've just managed to find an extension lead so once I figure out how to plug it in without having to move those giant shelves full of stuff I'll be good to go.  This weekend I plan to spend several hours sewing.  I haven't decided what yet, think I need to have a browse through some of the books to choose a project.