Growing up in Sweden in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, I learned to knit in the fifth grade like all other Swedish girls. What we learned didn’t inspire. Brown garter stitch slippers with our teacher, the proverbial disapproving spinster, focusing on mistakes and errors rather than effort and creativity. Like all Swedish knitters, I hold the yarn in my left hand with my fingertips close to my needles. The first time I saw someone wrapping the yarn around the needle with their right hand was after I moved to Great Britain in the early 1970s. In Europe, how you knit is still very much determined by where you grow up; it’s only in America that knitters choose whether to hold the yarn in the left or right hand and then continually agonize over which is the faster way to knit!

I took up needles a few times in my college years but I didn’t begin knitting again in earnest until after I had moved to America, and then to Melbourne, Australia in the mid 1980’s. Living with a baby boy who didn’t sleep much, I turned to knitting as a way of maintaining my sanity and of producing something tangible during a time of severe sleep deprivation. Alexander slept so little that, in one six month period I made 12 garments!

After we moved back to America in 1989, I was introduced to the Seattle Knitters’ Guild, began working at a yarn shop, and started teaching beginning knitting classes. I have never looked back. I feel very fortunate to have developed as a knitter in the Pacific Northwest where we have lots of great yarn shops, a vibrant knitting guild, and an incredible number of very accomplished knitters, some of whom I am now lucky enough to count as my closest friends. Since that inauspicious beginning in the mid 1960’s, I have come a long way as a knitter and today what I enjoy more than anything is teaching and mentoring others.

In addition to teaching locally, I also offer my workshops and classes at other shops in Washington state, and at regional retreats and national conventions. I teach regularly at all four Stitches events as well as at the Madrona Fiber Arts retreat in Tacoma, WA - the Pacific Northwest's premiere fiber event. For information about my classes and detailed class descriptions, please visit the class descriptions pages or, for a comprehensive overview, print out a hard copy of my workshop information booklet. I enjoy taking my workshops on the road so email me if you are interested in talking further.

I go to as many knitting retreats and conferences as I can to further my own education and to try and stay connected with what happens in the knitting and fiber world. In recent years, I have been fortunate enough to travel to Estonia, Iceland, and Finland to attend the annual Nordic Knitting Symposia which has given me an opportunity to connect my knitting life here with my cultural and linguistic roots there. This has enriched my life more than I could have imagined.