turmeric and twine, a book cover story.

plus a very special gift for anyone who pre-orders MAKING THINGS before December 31.

We made a book. It has a cover! And a cover means that you can now pre-order MAKING THINGS: Finding Use, Meaning, and Satisfaction in Crafting Everyday Objects.

Yes! The book comes out in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia on May 7, 2024, but right this very minute you can place an order and if you fill out our fancy form, we’ll send a little pressie that you can print and turn into a ZINE to put under the tree, or into a stocking, or offer to whichever family member has sacrificed their kitchen this week in the noble pursuit of latke-making. We’ve made the last-minute Hanukkah/Christmas/Holiday present of dreams, if we do say so ourselves.

Even better, if you’re in the US or Canada and pre-order your copy through BOOKS ARE MAGIC, your pre-ordered copy will be sent to you SIGNED! By us! YAHOOO!

All of the nitty-gritty details are at the end of this letter, if you are v busy and just want to buy our book already.

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To the three remaining people who I haven’t yet told, I’ve written a new book with my very dearest friend, Rose Pearlman. It’s called MAKING THINGS, it’s being published by Hardie Grant, and incredibly it’s five months out from landing on shelves, which in publishing time is approximately five minutes!

MAKING THINGS is a big, honking book filled with ideas of…things to make. It offers instruction and guidance for simple projects, many of which we hope might serve a practical, beautiful purpose in your daily life, but it’s also a book we hope offers you encouragement to look at materials differently, to use your hands, to take risks, to dive right into making things whether or not you’ve ever made something before! We hold your hand if you want us to and we encourage you to take bounding leaps into the abyss of imagination and creativity if you’re ready to do that. (If you never want to make anything, it’s also just pretty to look at! Wouldn’t be wrong to buy because you love turmeric-colored books. Your shelf needs a pop of color. We got you.)

Speaking of the cover, it features a linen cloth that Rose dyed with turmeric and punched with white butcher’s twine while I encouraged her from the sidelines with the kind of ALL-CAPS texts that are my speciality.

It was the final version in an incredibly long list of covers that we considered. (Amanda Jane Jones, who designed our book, and helped us turn our scribbles into a legible zine, is truly a saint and has the roughly 1,374 different covers she designed to prove it.) This cover does not feature photographs of our projects or our faces or artfully arranged craft supplies. It’s a little abstract, a little mysterious, a little bit risky.

But we are the kind of women who dye linen with turmeric in our best pots and dump the remains into our kitchen sinks. We are the kind of women who bravely, boldly encourage our friends to do this for us! We do this first thing in the morning before, maybe, even brushing our teeth. We let the cloth drip-dry into a white tub. We aren’t afraid of taking risks.

Still, even when you are very brave, launching a book is scary and we hope that you, some of our most beloveds, can help. Pre-ordering a book—which is to say buying it before you can hold it in your own two hands—is a thing that you may or may not have been humbly, repeatedly, doggedly begged to do by a hopeful author at one point or another. That’s because pre-orders help determine how a book will fare when it’s finally ready to be fondled. Pre-orders help booksellers figure out how many copies of a book to buy, they help convince publishing sales teams how much energy to devote to hawking a particular title, they help influence the kind of buzz a book generates in the worlds of press and publicity. Pre-orders count toward the first week of book sales, which means that if a miracle occurs and literal thousands of people buy a turmeric-dyed book about making things, we could debut on a bestseller list. Audentes fortuna juvat!

If you’ve ever considered buying a scrappy, bold book of crafts—and of course I mean OUR scrappy, bold book of crafts, I hope we might be able to convince you to place an early order.

And while I’m begging, I might as well brag. We sent noted craft-enthusiast, Jonathan Safran Foer, our early pages and this is what he had to say:

"This book teaches the reader how to make all kinds of beautiful things, but also how to make meaning. It is an antidote to the alienation created by a life of screens, reminding us that we have bodies, and preferences, and are more able than we've grown to believe."

Reader, we cried.

We sent first pages to Melanie Falick, the publishing world’s original craft powerhouse and she called it,

“A magnum opus of fun, clever, aesthetically pleasing projects for home and family! Beautifully presented and bound to become a classic.”

We beamed.

Leann Ford, freewheeling designer extraordinaire said,

This dreamy book has my head spinning with future project possibilities! I am inspired and ready to create!

We did matching shoulder shimmies of glee.

In short, we love MAKING THINGS and we really, really hope you do, too.

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ALL THE IMPORTANT DETAILS:

MAKING THINGS: Finding Use, Meaning, and Satisfaction in Crafting Everyday Objects. (Available now for pre-order at all the mega-bookstores and the indie ones, too.)

But….

If you place your pre-order through BOOKS ARE MAGIC anytime before April 30, 2024, we’ll SIGN it. (This means you’ll get a signed copy of our book when it comes out PLUS the eternal warm glow of having supported an indie bookstore instead of the-site-that-shall-not-be-named! US/CAN orders, only!)

And…

If you place your pre-order AND fill out our PRE-ORDER THANK YOU FORM before December 31st 2023, to let us know, we’ll send you a zine, called TRASH TO TWINE (plus instructions for making it)!

WE LOVE YOU WE LOVE YOU WE LOVE YOU.