There are times when I regret the time of improvisation. It seems to me that my children are busier than me at their age and therefore less inclined to throw away time on creative nonsense. But maybe I am so busy that I don’t realise it. Or maybe time for adults runs at a different speed: it sputters away inexorably… Unless we run away.

I did that last Thursday in Turin: a three-day long day.

The pretext was the great book show and I travelled alone. That is, it was just me and the thinking me. At a certain point I left that in the ranks of the publishers and climbed onto the Pista 500, the roof of flowers and art at the Lingotto. I scrutinised Turin as a pigeon would on a gutter, crunching Trenitalia crackers, and wandered around the track without following the recommended route. And I had a perfect cup of coffee at the café, on the terrace overlooking one of the track’s two elevations, the painted one. Further below the industrial buildings and a large window from which one could glimpse armchairs and the ghosts of past managers.

I am everything and nothing and this trip reminded me of that. The thinking me would like to feel like a publisher and wanted to go and talk to distributors and look around to see how to make things work. The real me was seduced by F. Gennari’s coat sculpture, entitled … I also had 7 stars in my pocket….

I probably only have glitter in my pockets, but I realised that pausing on improvisation, every now and then, outside of rigid, serial programming, feeds the spirit. And this e-book platform was born to support my improvisations, which teach me so much.

Today the pdf Vintage ladies is published, on the embroideries told a few days ago: I drew in fine print and centred the three designs of the four ladies, noted the quality and number of threads and filled in the stitch card. I have found it interesting to superimpose the instructions on the pictures, thus combining the need to have a reference photo and also to shrink the space of the explanations, avoiding having too many pages printed.

Although… My suggestion is always to print only the useful drawing!

Here is the link to the shop!