OMGOMGOMGOMG!

You know that feeling when you HAVE TO MAKE THE THING NOW, but you have to go to work or it’s already 10pm and you have to get up early tomorrow or you’re not at all anywhere near your hoard of supplies to make The Thing? That’s CRAFTURGENCY. A friend and I came up with this word as we were (are) constantly struggling with Making vs The Responsible Stuff (though, there is a valid argument that the making is also part of the ‘responsible stuff’, but that discussion is for another day). I decided to just build the damned website to share all the making with everyone else. The goal is to share the interesting and pretty while serving as inspiration for others to heed the call to make.

By day, I herd software engineers, tally numbers, set up conference calls, learn bash scripting, wrangle insurance documents, and sometimes copy edit technical documents so people who don’t write code 14 hours a day can maybe understand them.

By night and on weekends, I am either knitting, weaving, baking, spinning, dyeing, trying to felt, trying to bind books, sewing, gardening, working on some illumination or calligraphy, assembling sparkly bits into earrings, taking pictures with my digital camera, painting, embroidering, thinking about trying to make something I haven’t made before, or some combination of all of the above. Sometimes (and possibly more often in the near future) I am on sailboats.

In September 2017, I started cello lessons. It has been a dream and become a Thing I Love.

In the past, I have worked at a translation company, a quilt shop, a tax office, two Austrian high schools, and many retail shops. I also went to university (where I briefly studied Anthropology, French, Latin, Icelandic, and majored in German), and had the extreme good fortune of being able to study for two years on exchange at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and later (not on exchange) for five weeks at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies (back when it was the Sigurður Nordal Institute) in Reykjavík, Iceland. And then, because I didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t find a job, I decided to go to grad school. So I went to the University of Wales Swansea. And I got an MA in Literary German Translation. I found a job eventually.