Whistler, BC, 2008 (Photo Greg Werker)

I’m a writer, editor, blogger, crafter, speaker and brainstormer. Though I do most of those things out of true love or compulsion, I like to get paid to do them, too.

My current crazed obsession focus is on the Mighty Ugly project, which I launched in April 2010. I run crafts workshops to help people free their minds and unleash their creativity, whether they see themselves as crafty or not. Go on over to that site to learn more about it, and to see what kinds of awesome ugly creatures people have created.

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 wrote 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.

At the end of my hiatus year I 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.

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 partner and our dog. In addition to my work I enjoy knitting, eating sushi, watching thunderstorms, dabbling in jewelry making, taking nice long walks in the woods with the dog (sans piña coladas, thankyouverymuch), the smell of clean laundry, reading sci-fi and comics and really great lit of many sorts, and championing the use of online media for fun and profit. And I really want to learn how to skateboard.