When a hobby becomes a career

If I’m being honest, I’m not really sure what I intended my career path to be.

When I was in high school, I was an avid reader and writer, and really enjoyed language and literature classes. My decision to study mathematics was a hasty one, and a surprise to everyone – including me.

I enjoyed most of my classes in my first year at Waterloo, but found the most satisfaction in those that focused on logic and rules. Applied mathematics was just a little bit too messy for my tastes, and computer science too practical. I absolutely loved the tidiness of Pure Mathematics, the rigour and clarity and elegance. When asked about my degree, I often joke that I spent four years doing logic puzzles.

But if you asked me what I intended to do with that degree… I had no ideas, no answer. After the third year, I travelled with some fellow students, visiting possible graduate schools. It became clear to me that although I enjoyed the discipline, mathematics didn’t run through my veins in the way it did my friends’. I took my math degree and headed out into the working world. I’d gone through the co-op program, and had experience working in software companies, so I fell into the most obvious and perfect job: working at Waterloo Maple, a company that developed a mathematical programming language.

Because of my writing and communication skills, I divided my time between user support, training and technical writing. I moved around a fair bit in the software industry, changing jobs when I got bored or frustrated. In the 1990s, small software companies were forever changing hands, merging, transmogrifying, and I floated around. Although I liked the work, I always struggled with the culture at these types of companies: I was too ‘arty’ for development teams, too technical for marketing (and certainly didn’t have the right skills for sales). My best jobs were those where I sat between the technical and the non-technical types, as an interpreter: user support, training, documentation.

From software to knitting

I’d been a knitter most of my life. For many years, it was an on-and-off activity, based on whether I had any spare time. Very little knitting got done while I worked on my degree, but as soon as I graduated I picked it up again.

For a few years, I knitted privately: at home, on my commutes to work, at the odd baseball game. Until that fateful day that they talk about in the movies – the day your life changes. I had left my knitting on my desk at work, and one of my colleagues noticed it, and remarked in passing that his partner was planning to open a yarn shop. She and I had coffee, before I even knew I felt this way, I found myself saying to her that I would like to try teaching.

Twenty years later, I make my living through knitting. I travel internationally to teach, I write and edit books. And I’m doing exactly the same thing I was doing in software: I’m an interpreter between the technical and non-technical types. After all, that’s what teaching is. My books take a slightly unusual approach, in that it’s not just about standardized step-by-step patterns; I teach knitters how to adapt and adjust and customize their knitting so that it fits them precisely. There’s a huge amount of mathematics and number crunching in that, of course.

Knitting is technical too

I get the most satisfaction in the technical writing and editing. I’ve become very well known for my skill in helping other designers write patterns and instructions. I work with designers and publishers around the world, and I wrote the only book on the market about how to write knitting patterns. I find myself thinking about usability in exactly the same way I did when writing product specifications for the developers. I try to write clear instructions for knitters of all skill levels and information processing styles, in exactly the same way I did when I was writing software documentation. Although it’s not as immediately obvious, my mathematics training is just as important here: even when there’s no numbers, knitting patterns need rigour and rules and precision.

I have built myself a career where my unusual mix of arty and logical is valued, and where my communication skills are applied to something that brings pleasure and creative satisfaction. I perhaps don’t knit quite as much as I would have expected, making a living in the knitting world – but if that’s my only complaint, it’s not a bad one.