Announcement! Signed, Sealed and Gainfully Employed- and Contest Time!

Astute blog readers may have noticed that I haven't shown any recent knitting projects (finished or un)- there's a reason for that, and I can finally announce why: I've begun work on another book! The contracts arrived today, so I can go public with the news.

Taunton (the same publisher who did such a marvelous job with I Heart Felt, and lucky me, I'll be working with the same wonderful editor) is going to publish my next book. I'd tell you the working title, but working titles get changed (in my case, 9 out of 9 times), so we'll just call it The Sock Book.

Yep, that's right. I'm writing a sock book. A Big sock book. And the deadline is a killer, which means it'll be all socks, all the time, until July.

The upside is that I am once again gainfully employed, which is always nice (that sort of thing makes the electric company very happy), and that I have another book in the pipeline (which is also very nice, in a purely egotistical way).

The downside is that I can't show any of the projects I'm working on for the book (though I will inevitably talk about the process- perhaps that *talking* will sometimes sound like *bitching and moaning*- and I intend to talk about all the wonderful yarns I'm using. Oh my, the yarns I'm using are fantastic).

But the real downside is that I'm going to have to suspend the Freebie Friday patterns for the time being, at least as a weekly thing. I simply will not be able to come up with a new pattern every week, and at the same time, design, knit, and write up 75 (yep, seventy-five) sock patterns by July. I do hope to squeeze a Freebie in here and there, but my priority right now is the paying job.

As a compensation for suspending the freebies, I think we'll have more contests, starting today.

I happen to have an extra advance copy of I Heart Felt (which won't hit the stands for another 3 weeks). Post a comment for this post between today and Midnight February 1, and one of the commentors will win a signed copy of a book that no one (well almost no one) has seen yet.

Not the same as a free weekly pattern, but I think it'll help.