Jen Lucas is working overtime, but took some time out of her busy schedule to visit the Yarn Thing podcast with Marly Bird. Jen has visited before, and says she’s been a listener since the beginning, and we can’t be more proud of her everytime we visit. 

Jen says she and some friends decided they needed to learn to knit after college, possibly inspired by the ‘Golden Girls’, even though the Sophia character was a crocheter. At the time many things were happening and helping people be inspired, like various knitting blogs, the tv show ‘Knitty Gritty’ with host Vickie Howell. Also, Stephanie Japel did a ‘design-your-own-shawl’ course. So she was able to continue her education easily online while she wore a lab coat by day, testing water.

Now her full-time job is writing books, teaching at knitting guilds… she feels it’s the best job ever, it feels so cool. [Read more…]

21 Crocheted Tanks and Tunics by Sandi Rosner was not Deja Vu, we asked her to come back to the Yarn Thing podcast when we knew she had a new book coming soon!

Sandi Rosner is the Executive Creative Director at Premier Yarns which includes the Downton Abbey line that we spoke of recently, but also the Deborah Norville and Isaac Mizrahi collections, as well as some private labels available at your local craftstores. She began crafting as a crocheter, then learned knitting later from yarn labels, magazines, books… Knitting took over her life, she even owned a yarn store for a while, then she went freelance designer, teacher, writer (I think she missed tech editor) and then moved from California to North Carolina to work with Premier Yarns. [Read more…]

Anne Berk‘s Continuing Adventures in Annetarsia was what today’s Yarn Thing with Marly Bird was all about. Its not been two years yet since Anne was here sharing her new book Annetarsia, and today we get to catch up with all that has happened since.

In her day job, Anne is an optometrist and shares an office with her husband, Bill, another optometrist. Bill’s hobby is photography, which is interesting as their hobbies together are detail oriented as well as their occupations. Bill actually came up with the term ANNETARSIA as it’s Anne’s uncomplicated method of intarsia. Anne considers herself a teacher with a desire to find a way to solve problems for knitters. Encouraging knitters to try something that only looks daunting, or creating techniques for modern knitters, such as knitting intarsia in the round, has been the challenge she studied and pursued to pass on to others. ‘It’s really not hard’, she says, ‘You just have to try it in a different way.’ Most of what she does is recreate other people’s designs in Annetarsia, such as recently, in her blog you can see she recreated Steven Be’s Shawlvest. Which means, to us, that it’s a technique that translates to other projects. [Read more…]