Here I am, well into the final bits of work on the embroidery book - tweaking, resizing, colour correcting and inserting pictures. Tomorrow will be a library day, where I will read and look up the final few books to give further reading suggestions for all the interesting stuff. (Or at least some of it.)

After that, the only things remaining is taking care of the cover layout (where I'll be getting some input from a friend), doing one printout of the whole shebang to check for any bad things that have crept in, do a final proofread to fix typos, and get a general impression on how nice my layout is. Fortunately there's a lovely book I got one day from a friend:

(That's "Graphic design for non-graphic designers", and it's a really wonderfully helpful book, and it's out of print, but you can get the ebook.)

 There's instructions for lots of stuff in there, including on how to set up the type area for a book. So I looked at that part again, did some thinking, and then did some drawing on a piece of paper. It happens to be a printout of the text (with no layout yet). Fun! And this is how the result of my having fun looked:

As much as I love computers, for some tasks you just can't beat a pencil, a ruler, and a piece of paper.

 Then the only thing left is to finish the front matter (German bookpeople call that the "Titelei" - which sounds very nice in a weird way, I think).

If things all go according to plan, I will send it to the printer on Monday... so only a few more days for me to spend in the thrall of the book. I'll be very happy when I can turn to other things again!