Doing what you do best...then combine it with something else

A couple of months ago I was contacted by Robin Hunter, whose blog: How to Become a Professional Knitter has been gaining popularity. One of the features of Robin's blog is that she does interviews with people in the yarn industry, asking a series of questions about their attitudes towards the present and the future of knitting as well as about how they came to find themselves in this field. I was happy to be asked to participate- and the interview and my answers can be found here.

Robin subtitles her site: a knitting blog about career transition, personal development and the search for fulfillment. I love it.

When I was teaching school, I spent most of my career telling my Grade 8 students to prepare for a world that is unlike their parents' world. There will be very few single career lives anymore, they will have to be flexible, creative, open to change and able to see value in unexpected situations. Although I had had many different jobs before coming to teaching, I really assumed that it would be my career for the rest of my working life. I never suspected that having joined those ranks at 30 that I'd be getting out at 42. But truly, as I look back on it now, I AM A TEACHER. No one will ever be able to change that about me. It just happens that a lay off notice in 1996 pushed me to follow the lessons that I'd been passing on to my students for 12 years: Be flexible! Embrace Change!

So it would appear that Robin, like so many others including me, has done the career shift and has realized that it's not a matter of exchanging one hat for another, of wearing many different hats - sometimes simultaneously - sometimes in succession.

Maria Offin approached me this winter to do a photoshoot at the store. Maria is a knitter who was wanting to expand her photography portfolio at this new stage of her life. And like so many of you, Maria recognizes the beauty of fibre and she was wanting to incorporate it into some of her photographic business. I was thrilled and have some great shots of the store to use including this one of me, that I must say, I quite like.

Frankie LeMonde-Meunier is one of the featured artists from the Kingston Fibre Artists on display at the WOOL-TYME Kingston store this month. Don't you love her crocheted garden? Frankie's Fibre Art is usually more of the needle-and-thread-and-fabric-and beads type. Here, she let herself go into another whole world of crochet crazy colours grouped together in a giant wild and wooly bouquet.

Finally, let's hear it for Alicia Peltsch whose knitted brain was a very special gift, incorporating her grounding in neuroscience and her love of knitting. Here's how she describes it:

When I graduated with a PhD in neuroscience I wanted to give my supervisor a non-traditional but special gift that was more “me” than the traditional bottle of scotch.

Since I basically knit my way through my PhD to keep my sanity intact, I thought it would be only fitting to knit him a brain. He LOVED it! He even brought it to work the next week to show everyone.

I’ve finally attached the free pattern - enjoy!!

Each of us, Robin with her knitwear design and blog writing, Maria with her developing (pardon the out of date pun) career in photography, Frankie with the beauty of her crochet bursting into her other artistic media, Alicia with her statement of combined commitments, and me - taking the plunge all those years ago to opening the store into a world I love, have had to spread our wings over new territory, incorporating several aspects of ourselves that we know we're good at and developing a link between them. How lucky we are to be able to play in the same garden where we work!