When Susan Kassirer was a child, her mother Norma used to read to her and make up stories all the time. Among the stories Norma read to Susan was The Knitting Witch.

“I had not heard of it probably since I was 7 years old,” Susan recently shared with The Newtown Bee.

Following her mother’s passing, Kassirer went through the stacks of manuscripts left behind in her mother’s Buffalo, N.Y., apartment and found the long-lost manuscript.

“‘Oh my God, The Knitting Witch,’” the Newtown resident laughed. “I pulled it out, I think I sat on the floor, and I started reading it. I was just as captivated by it as I was when I was a little kid.”

The Knitting Witch follows a character named Ivy Lou, a spoiled girl who throws tantrums of epic proportions. Ivy Lou encounters a witch with plans to turn the girl into a witch’s child.

After rereading the manuscript, Kassirer showed it to her trusted friend, fellow Newtown resident Mark Richardson

“I just knew that [he] would get [Norma] right, you know, I knew [Mark] would get her sensibility,” said Kassirer. She was right. An illustrator, Richardson took great care creating images for a collaborative effort that is scheduled to be published in a few weeks. Kassirer has thoughtfully edited and Richardson has illustrated The Knitting Witch, scheduled for publication by The Collective Book Studio on October 1.

Richardson chimed in, saying he never met Norma, but “I feel like I know her from reading her.” He explained it took him about nine months of working time over the span of a year to create the 40 plus pictures included in the book.

Richardson was very meticulous in his design. He primarily worked with ink and watercolor to create an “antique” look for the pictures, he said.

Flipping through the pages, the aesthetic comes to life with the sepia tones he used to make the images. Richardson shared a story of a repairman coming to his home and describing his method as “old style.”

At least two of the images were modified digitally after they were scanned into his computer. Richardson realized he really wanted to create full page images for the chapter heads. At the beginning of Chapter 7, he created a picture of the witch uprooting trees, but it was only a half page. He taped another piece of paper to the original and created a full page. Once the two images were scanned in, he went back in and erased the line where the two pages met.

His primary goal was to get Ivy Lou right

“If I couldn’t get that character, then you can’t get any of it,” he said. “I knew I could do the witch … that was going to be pretty simple.”

Norma was very clear in her descriptions of the witch, he added.

“Norma was very specific about describing this witch as a … very satisfying witch with that pointed hat and green skin and the cloak. She describes the witch pretty completely. The only thing I had to decide was how real or cartoonish to make her,” Richardson said.

Richardson went to work creating a prototype of the book by cutting and pasting its passages and his images to plain computer paper. He then spent six weeks teaching himself how to navigate Adobe InDesign. The result was a hand-bound version of the short chapter book.

Kassirer has a background as a children’s book editor, so she started sending the manuscript to publishers. The Collective Book Studio picked it up and decided to add foils to the cover to “make it sparkle.”

Kassirer and Richardson will be hosting a book launch party and signing at Byrd’s Books, 178 Greenwood Avenue in Bethel, on Sunday, October 27, at 4 pm. Registration for the event is recommended. Visit byrdsbooks.com for more.

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.