I have to come clean about something: I am a knitter.
That is to say, I'm not a non-knitter. I can and have knitted hats and mitts and have even designed hand-knits. Earlier in the year I completed the first ever garment for a pregnant colleague's new-born. However, my career has now changed and I therefore find myself unable to continue to poke fun, at least not too often, at knitters and designers. After all, they now provide me with work.
I was a teacher for many years, a good teacher I'd like to think, but the competing pressures of work and family never quite balanced out. The politically driven changes to education, my dwindling passion for the job and the exhaustion from the failure to balance the needs of school and home left me ill. Despite fighting on with a misplaced sense of duty, I ended up signed off and confined to bed for weeks. By this point, it was clear that I couldn't continue as a teacher.
Luckily, I had an alternative job opportunity that would suit me. I'm pretty good mathematically, know my way round a spreadsheet and have edited hundreds of student projects. Going into business tech-editing knitting patterns with Jen was the obvious thing to do.
It's been and continues to be a near vertical learning curve, but the challenges I face every day are deeply satisfying. It's a genuine thrill to be part of the process of turning an idea into a published pattern. More importantly, we seem to be on the right side of work/life balance in that we can generally put family first.
As to my knitting, well I'm waiting for some yarn to arrive in the post. I'll be slowly making myself Jón by Hulda Hákonardóttir as part of the BomBella colourwork KAL. In five years or so, I'll finish it. I seem to have a habit of starting a project, then putting it down for months at a time. Maybe I'm not quite a knitter, nor a non-knitter, just a less knitter.