Wearables Book - the Ultimate Behind the Scenes

For almost a year I've been working on a book about Wearables for Franzis Verlag, which turned into a mammoth project. But it's been an exciting journey with very few creative limitations (at least so far).

On the one hand, the book is aimed at teenagers and young adults, as its heart component is four e-textile projects with detailed instructions for making them at home. It also includes very comprehensible explanations of how a basic electric circuit and electronics in general work. On the other hand, there is a whole chapter dedicated to interviews with inspiring e-textile artists, like Kate Hartman, Mika Satomi & Hannah Perner-Wilson, Afroditi Psarra, Irene Posch, Emilie Giles and Cristina Batista, which might be of interest for anyone excited about this field.

I definitely underestimated the amount of work when I took this project on... In the end, those were the various tasks I had to deal with:

• book concept and structure
• contact all participating artists, preparing a questionnaire, then chase everyone to get the interviews and pictures on time. oh yes, and translate the interviews to German
• think through all the projects for the book, partially edit and extend some and partially come up with a completely new ones
• sew first-test prototypes
• write tutorials and advanced options for every project, introduction, basics, and and and, and make rough sketches to plan future photos
• research artificial light and studio set-up, and chase down the necessary photo equipment for studio shots (which involved getting a special tripod for horizontal position, in order to make overhead shots of my working desk. and a software to transmit live view from the camera directly to the laptop screen, and a remote exposure button. All this enabled me to shoot without getting away from the table, where I was sewing all the projects).
• organise a photo-shoot for project covers by finding several underground-ish locations (which is a challenge in itself in Munich), with a dear friend Manya Donska coming to town from another city, and my wonderful models (exploiting my nephew and nieces) freeeezing for a whole day in December. (Read about this photoshoot here)
• choosing the best pictures, editing them in Lightroom and Photoshop, in some cased rewriting or rearranging the text to match the pictures.
• make some technical illustrations in... guess it... Illustrator
• and finally layout the different types of pages: project covers, lists with material, tutorials, artist interviews, etc. (I am so happy the entire text is going to be set in place by a professional typesetter, otherwise it would have taken me another year to finish the book )))

 courtesy of Maria Donska

I don't know the official publishing date yet and there will be some amendments to the book, but I just wanted to capture all these steps here, before I forget them myself.

By the way, I was overwhelmed with joy, that EVERY single artist I've contacted, eventually got back to me! (ok, some of them half a year later, but still )) The book only features a shortened version of the interviews, so I am going to gradually publish them here, and in their original English or German version. Keep your eyes open for moarrrr!