About

Whistler, BC, 2008 (Photo Greg Werker)

I’m a writer, editor, blogger, crafter, speaker and brainstormer. Although I do most of those things out of true love or compulsion, I like to get paid to do them, too. If you’d like to pay me, do get in touch.

Here’s a little more about me:

In late 2008, I left my job as editor of Interweave Crochet magazine and I sold CrochetMe.com, which I had launched in 2004 and which grew first as an online magazine and then as a fabulous community of innovative crocheters from all over the world. Selling the site resulted in what I like to think of as my paid-for-in-advance 2009, a yearlong hiatus during which I write whatever I wanted to write, spent a lot of time with friends and family, and generally mulled over what I wanted to work on next.

The Creative Life, a blog I write with Betsy Greer, was conceived in conversation during the most confused part of my hiatus. In a sort of pen-pal-but-public format, we write, share, lament, ponder, explore, celebrate, and vent about the paths we’ve chosen, the destinations we strive to reach, and the wheels we’ve decided to reinvent to get us safely there.

At the end of my hiatus year I also started writing for the new Make and Meaning blog. It’s a collaborative blog about the community of crafts and about creativity in general.

Speaking of crafts, in addition to working on the magazines and co-hosting the first three seasons of Knitting Daily TV, I also wrote six books. With Cecily Keim I coauthored Teach Yourself Visually Crocheting (Wiley, 2006), a comprehensive, full-colour-photograph illustrated, step-by-step manual of crochet. I also wrote Get Hooked: Simple Steps To Crochet Cool Stuff (Watson-Guptill, 2006), a wildly fun, multi-contributor book geared to teenagers for which a sequel was released in the fall of 2007, cleverly titled Get Hooked Again: Simple Steps To Crochet More Cool Stuff. Also released in late 2007 was a smaller-format companion book to TYV, Crochet Visual Quick Tips. And of course there’s my baby, the book inspired by CrochetMe.com: Crochet Me: Designs to Fuel the Crochet Revolution (Interweave) hit shelves in October, 2007. A dozen CrochetMe.com designers contributed patterns, and I wrote lots of essays, sidebars, bios, and a pattern for a pair of humongous funny dolls. Finally, Crocheted Gifts (Interweave) was released in the fall of 2009. Its title is pretty self explanatory, and I’m very proud of its contents.

I’ve written for Interweave Crochet, Interweave Knits, Crochet Today, Knit.1 and Yarn Market News magazines, and I occasionally design funky dolls for publication. My dolls have shown their faces in the aforementioned Crochet Today magazine and in the books Not Your Mama’s Crochet, by Amy Swenson; and Lion Brand Just Gifts.

If you’ve made it this far into my rambling bio and you’d like to hire me to write something, please contact me.

I have a B.A. in linguistics from Binghamton University (SUNY), my honours thesis for which was about the creolization of pidgins. And I have an M.A. in educational studies from the University of Delaware, for which I performed research on babies regarding some particularities of language acquisition.

I live in Vancouver, BC, with my husband and our dog. In addition to my work I enjoy knitting, eating sushi, watching thunderstorms, spinning yarn, skiing only in the best weather conditions, hiking, reading, the smell of clean laundry, reading sci-fi and comics, and championing the use of online media for fun and profit. And I really want to learn how to skateboard.