Welcome to The Weaving Book Website

The Weaving Book: Patterns and Ideas

by Helene Bress

We have the first copies of The Weaving Book right from the press and the rest will be here soon! Around the second week in August, we should be able to start shipping. So we can now answer some questions.

What is the price? Same as it was more than 25 years ago. $65.00 Shipping. (Shipping looks to be under $4 in the US.)

When can I see it? If you are going to the Convergence show in New Mexico July 21, come by the Flower Valley Press booth and have a look.

Are there any discount programs? If you'd like to order a case of 9 copies, we can offer a 15% discount.

Can I order a copy online? When we have copies in stock, we will be able to take orders through this site using PayPal. We ~may~ make it available through Amazon as well.

The Weaving Book is coming back! A number of years ago when we ran out of copies, we thought we could do a simple reprint. The catch was that no one knew where the original plates went that were used to print the book. The Weaving Book was originally published many, many years ago by Charles Scribner's Son's. It was later sold to another publisher. At the time of its last printing, my father cut a deal to get a significant portion of the print run. Shortly after, the publisher made him an offer to take the last remaining copies. During this time, the plates disappeared into warehouses (or the trash) somewhere.

Our printer thought that they could just scan and reprint, but test prints came out looking pretty lousy. We tried a bunch of different ways to scan and enhance in order to do a simple reprint, but the method used to design the book nearly 30 years ago didn't lend itself to being copied. It did make it affordable to print, which was the only consideration in those deep, dark days before computers did all of the book design.

We just happened to have most of the original photos for the book tucked away in our warehouse, meaning hidden and forgotten. Dan got his hands on them and tried scanning the old photos to see how they held up. With the help of a ton of computers and image processing software, they held up pretty well. In fact, most of them looked far better than the originals! The good looking photos caused a cascade of work, as Dan wanted the text to look equally good, then, while he was at it, figured that he could do a more interesting design on the book than he was allowed to 30 years earlier. We hope that you like the results

Below are a few samples of the newly designed pages. To really get a feel how the book will look, we have also posted PDF files of these pages so that you can see them at their full resolution, along with scans of the original book to serve as a point of comparison. The downloads are a little big, so please be patient.

We will keep you informed on our progress through this web site, and should even be able to answer questions in the near future.

To download the PDFs, click on the page that you would like to see from this list. Left click to view, right click to download and save or print.