What It Takes to Make a Calendar

When our publisher, John Bolton, suggested that we make a 2010 calendar for Spin-Off in the tradition of Quilting Arts Magazine's annual calendars, Stefanie Berganini, Linda Ligon, and I were enthusiastic about the suggestion and full of ideas. Linda thought we should have a haiku contest about spinning, Stefanie was eager to lend her skills as a graphic designer to the project, and I was imagining all the little bits of spinning and fiber and tools that we'd need to gather to create lovely images for the project. So we set to work creating a calendar. We put out a call for entries for haiku, we decided we would each create four collages that captured the essence of spinning and alluded to the seasons, and we'd create a list of fiber events happening in 2010 to add to the calendar. Pretty soon the haiku started trickling in, we had a pile of boxes to photograph for each month, and the list of fiber events was coming together.

Haiku

We invited Allison Mackin, Spin-Off's editorial assistant, to help us judge the haiku contest since she earned her MFA in poetry. We assigned numbers to the haiku (removing all names) and privately selected our favorites, then got together to compare notes. The final list came together pretty easily, and we soon had assigned a haiku to each month.

Congratulations to these poets who submitted their spinning haiku for our calendar!

Deborah Ader of Towson, Maryland
Joanna Daneman of Middletown, Delaware
Marianne deSalle Horchler of Thomasville, Georgia
Kris Diede of Oakland, California
Cheryl Magyar of Ópusztaszer, Hungary
Jan Meyer of Loveland, Colorado
Sharon Rose of Paoli, Pennsylvania

Photography

We gathered twelve boxes, one for each month, and brought in our items for the collages. Each of us ransacked our homes for spinning tools, bits of yarn, fiber, and interesting objects to create the collages (and confessed that we had left a mess in our wake at our respective homes). We started putting together the objects-thinking about how we could best express the amazing range of diversity and variety available to spinners-and also creating appealing spinnerly scenes, also evocative of the seasons of the year. With a bit of tweaking and fiddling, we were ready for photography-all we had to do was transport the twelve boxes from Loveland to Joe Coca's photography studio in Fort Collins!

Design

After a successful afternoon in the photography studio, Stefanie sat down at her computer to bring all the pieces together, and after proofing and tweaking, we were finally done. The calendar is now at the printer's and ready for preorders - it is hard to believe that 2010 is just around the corner.