In Which Natty Knits Changes Her Bio Statement

It’s hard to write a biographical statement about yourself. It’s not a natural thing to do, to write about yourself in a nice way, in the third person. In fact the more I think about it, it’s a bit bonkers. But it is natural that my customers would want to know who I am. After all, humans want to trade with other humans and we want to check on their humanity a bit while we’re at it.

My bio has always been something along the lines of :

Natty Knits is an expat Brit stay at home Mum who likes to knit around corners.

But this is no longer true. My son, for whom I began knitting toys all those crazy years ago, is now 7 years old. He is at school for most of the day, he has t-ball practice and play dates without me, today he spent most of the afternoon in the garage building a bi-plane out of cardboard, he says “it might fly”. The truth of the matter is that it’s time for me to stop claiming I am a stay at home Mum.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still doing housework and packing lunches, supervising homework and changing bed sheets. I am always there to pick him up from school and we still have plenty of adventures together. It’s just that now, I also have a grown up job.

Well, sort of grown up. I am the children’s book specialist at an independent bookstore called Diesel, a bookstore. It is the best job ever. I read to the preschoolers at story time, I run events with children’s authors and I read, read, read as many of the new books as I can get my hands on, so I can recommend cool new books to the kids. The book store is six months old, although the owners have had a bookstore since 1989. I have done this job before in a tiny bookstore in San Francisco, although then, I only worked eight hours a week and I was less of an expert too.

The more astute among you may be wondering, if I’m trying to tell you something. What about the knitting? Is Natty Knits still writing patterns? The answer is yes, I am still knitting and I am still writing patterns, I’m just writing them more slowly.

In previous years I’ve always tried to write six knitting patterns each year. In 2014, I will be happy with three new patterns. I’m not planning any magazine submissions. And I’m going to keep my custom knitting to a minimum, mostly because I need new socks. There will still be blog entries, although I may just dip into the archives and reblog very popular tutorials. I’ve written over 400 blog entries and some of them are even useful.

I’ll leave you with the beginnings of my new bio: