Although I am a "mature" woman, I vividly remember giving birth (x5!). Getting the catalogue for our coming exhibition out the door to the printer, a goal still not yet achieved, is turning out to be a very similar experience, only far more protracted. Every time I *think* everything is pretty much set to go, there's another fly in the ointment...

Here are a few of the things that have been involved, and several of the pitfalls. The first thing--which goes back to a beginning, a couple of years ago--was locating and deciding on the samplers that would be included in the exhibit (and catalogue). My goal, however lofty, was to try to track down as many examples as possible of needlework styles from all across the state of Maine, but ones that were disctinctive enough to constitute separate bodies of work from particular teachers or academies. A high percentage of basic marking samplers just don't make that cut. They are lovely, but lack the ornamental elements that make a group distinctive. Not surprisingly, even when I found unique works that would help define groups, the owners were not always willing to loan. That has proven to be one of the most major of pitfalls. I had, for example, through the kindness of the collector, located a substantial group of first rate Maine pieces, several of which seemed to me to be of critical importance to the exhibit, if we were to meet the goal. In the end, the collector decided not to loan them. Ouch.

The second thing involved was to get good photographs of the works that would be in the catalogue. Prior to beginning this eneterprise, I had heard of dpi, but it meant little or nothing to me. Now it haunts my nightmares. The photos HAVE to be 300 dpi, (dots per inch) or they will look like murky messes on the printed page. Collecting the photos turned out to be another difficult problem. I needed them in order to get the pages set up. Sometimes it was very near impossible to get the photos in a timely fashion. I, in my innocence and--greater issue--ignorance, believed that I should set a goal of getting either the needlework here so we could have the photographs taken OR the photographs taken by the owners and sent to me, by mid-November. Stupid. These were two entirely different aspects of the project and the timeframe for them should also have been different. It would have been far wiser to aim for getting the photos of samplers owned by institutions last summer; then if there were delays, as there almost always are, I would have had plenty of time.

A secondary photography issue was that I wanted to include the photos of those wonderous pieces that were not going to be loaned, which I had taken photos of last winter=for research purposes--never intending them to be included in a catalogue. Those samplers ought to have been rephotographed by a professional, but a combination of factors eventually made that impossible. Worrying over that whole issue was really awful and it ending up coming down to the wire, making final formatting impossible until very late in the game.

The third thing was the writing. I write a lot. I like to write. I loved doing the research for the 125 or so bios of the sampler makers and perhaps another 20 or 30 of their teachers. In fact, now that all of the research is done, I'm experiencing some sad kind of withdrawal pains. But all of that took an enormous amount of time, and sadly, right in the midst of it, two key staff members left. That meant that a) they were no longer here to help with the bio research, b) time had to be spent finding replacement people, and c) I and one other remaining museum staff person had to try to do their work, in addition to our own.

Writing, Part B, involved that nasty business of editing, for which I confess to having only an average eye, or ability. As the issues, above, mounted, I found it harder and harder to sleep at night. Partly it was because I was working very late many nights; if I wasn't working late, I was fretting late (almost as much fun, right?) The less sleep I got, the worse I became at spotting the missing commas. One of the former staff people very kindly donated her time to edit the thing--no small feat--and sent all of her changes, neatly encapsulated within that Track Changes feature of Word. I think, somehow, that in accepting the changes, I "lost" a LOT of them, and then, unknowingly sent it back off to the designer still really needing an edit. That meant, when it came back again, for a final quick loo(!), it was still in need of a lot of attention.

I have signed a contract with virtualbookworm.com Publishing, who are very nice to work with so far, and the only on-demand publisher I could find that used 60 lb. paper, but I still don't have a book in their hands to print and the exhibit is really only a bit more than a month away right now. Egads! In a couple of days,when the manuscript is finally off to them--I HOPE!--I will write again about new sampler discoveries, which is a lot more fun for readers than my whining.