Making a Book About Canadian Wool

26 April 2022

Sponsored in part by:

Ad description: Cover of the book Sheep, Shepherd & Land, and the words, "THE book about Canadian Wool, by Anna Hunter. Photos by Christel Lanthier. Buy now."

Ad description: The words, "The socks you knit won't last forever, but you can make them last for years and years. Shop now." Also featuring the cover image of the Sock Mending Guide.

When we launched Digits & Threads, we formed a company called Nine Ten Publications; we knew we wanted to publish books along with this online magazine. Indeed, we launched co-founder Kate Atherley’s ebook, Custom-Fit Hats, at the same time we launched D&T.

Now, we’re very excited to be working on our first print book. Author Anna Hunter and photographer Christel Lanthier travelled across Canada interviewing fellow fibre farmers about their motivations, their commitment to climate-beneficial agriculture, and their work to reinvigorate the Canadian wool industry.

Sheep, Shepherd & Land (working title!) will be a compilation of interviews, photographs, and Anna’s expertise on breed-specific wool, why it’s crucial to build regional infrastructure to support the fibre supply chain, and how deepening our understanding of where our craft materials come from can improve our relationship to what we make.

Embarking on print publishing as a new company is a challenge, to a huge extent because printing is wildly expensive. So to ensure we can cover the huge cost to print this book, we launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The amazing news is that we already met our initial goal! This book is certainly going to happen. Every dollar raised beyond our initial goal will make it possible for us to pay the author and photographer more, for us at Nine Ten to get paid at all, and for the book to have more pages and be even more awesome.

There’s still a few weeks left in the Kickstarter, and there are some amazing rewards on offer there beyond being able to pre-order the book. There are options including a signed book, wool yarn from Anna’s mill at Long Way Homestead, special pricing on an ebook of knitting patterns designed for breed-specific wool yarn that will be a complement to the print book and is available at an exclusively low price only during the Kickstarter… and more!

Image description: Mockups of a book about sheep and wool, including the book cover, table of contents, and interior spread.
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