1 Across Beanie

Finally, folks, it's up! My 1 Across Beanie pattern is on Knitty! Very exciting day! And welcome if you've popped over from Knitty - lovely to see you here!

Doesn't Dotter look stunning in that white wig? She was actually bald at the time, having recently shaved her head for the Shave for Cure event (Leukaemia Foundation).

You can sew on letter beads to make your very own little crossword, too! OneLook is a great online resource which can help you figure out interlocking words, if you're so inclined.

This is a fast knit, you could do it in an evening or two, and the stranded knitting really isn't that hard - honest! You only have to count stitches for 4 rows, as the second row of each 'line' in the crossword is a duplicate of the one below. Eight rows of Fair Isle all up.

I've also included two chart variations, one for the British-style of crossword, and one for the American-style. What's the difference, I hear you ask?

Well, American-style crosswords have nearly every letter 'checked' - they appear in two words, an across and a down. So these grids are mostly white letters with a few black. British-style crosswords have a lot of unchecked letters – in any given word, generally just half of the letters are cross-referenced by another word. These grids have a lot more black squares.

I hope you enjoy the pattern! I've been playing around with how to effectively knit crossword grid designs for some years now, and am happy with how well this one's come together. Just a bit of fun :)

OK, back to the book - I got the proofs this morning, and have a whole three days (4 weeks is more typical!) to complete the technical and editing review of the book ... but regardless of all this, I refuse to miss Stitch n Bitch this afternoon!

Cover job

Here's the draft cover for the new book! I really like what they've done - the bit of code in the lower right hand section is one of the ciphers I wrote in the Cypher of the Rose Croix (a Masonic cipher). The bit they've highlighted in red reads "one thing" (it's an extract from a full message within the book).

It's rather awesome to think that something I drew on my light box, with my calligraphy pen, and scanned here in my office at home is going to be printed on thousands of books ... !! The whole process still blows me away.

This week has been testing ciphers, going a bit cross-eyed from it. I probably won't have time to test all 350 puzzles, but have done over 180 so far. I'm checking the hand-written / hand-coded puzzles as top priority, as they're more likely to have errors. Have picked up some good ones, too, which now no-one will ever know about, ha ha ha! Well, apart from my editor Sarah ;)

And once the layout comes back from Production, it'll be into more serious proofreading and editing. We'll probably have a whole three days for this (as opposed to the usual 3-4 weeks on a normal book!). Any day now ...

In the mean time, yes, I've had a LOT of sleep, spent good parts of 3 days in bed, finished a novel I started reading a month ago, watched TV, knitted, cooked meals, and even gone shopping. It's all good :)

ETA : Just to clarify, I didn't design this cover, it's all done in house at Wiley. They just selected one of the ciphers I'd already written for the book and did cool things to it :)

100% delivery

Well, I made it - just. 100% delivery with 15 minutes to spare. That milestone was 4 am on Friday morning (2 pm on Thursday for my editor). I worked 21 hours straight that last day (7 am Thursday to 4 am Friday) - and spent all of yesterday in bed recovering! I think I've worked around 250 hours in the past fortnight.

The killer was that I thought I'd finished all the puzzles on Wednesday night, only to wake to an extremely apologetic email from my editor saying the decision had been made to add another 50 puzzles, all of which had to be supplied that day, along with all the Hints, Answers, and edited text chapters. They were all anagrams and cryptic clues, thankfully (quicker to write), but still - I only barely made the deadline.

There is still a week of editing and proofreading ahead, also on a compressed time line, but I've got the whole weekend off (bliss)!

The book should be out in November - a super fast turnaround for all concerned! A book like this would normally take 7-9 months from start to book on the shelves, not 2.

The title? Cracking Codes and Cryptograms for Dummies (ISBN: 978-0-470-59100-0). With a theme of conspiracies, the Freemasons, and secret societies. This book is very cool – my coauthor Mark wrote three conspiracy stories, and I encrypted the stories into a whole slew of different types of ciphers (letter substitutions, real Masonic ciphers, Caesar shifts, Rail Fence ciphers etc). So to read the stories you've got to crack the ciphers! There are also heaps of quotations as cryptograms.

Wiley have also asked for another 50 puzzles, which will be used in marketing the book and on the Wiley web site, so that's pretty excellent too - no mad deadline for those, we've got til the end of the month (I think my brain would have exploded otherwise).

The reason for the INSANE schedule? Wiley want to 'ride the wave' of interest in Freemasonry and cryptograms which is likely to be generated by the release of Dan Brown's next offering, The Lost Symbol, on 15 September. It's rumoured to be about the Masons...

You know, I've never read any of his books ... LOL.