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ABOUT ME

K grew up in Peoria, IL, proud to be a coal miner's great-granddaughter.  The oldest of two artistically inclined children, she and her brother were raised by their father and his parents in the house they built in the 1950s.

Her grandmother is an arts and crafts aficionado herself and schooled K well: she taught her to crochet and cross-stitch, dragged her to countless Spoon River Drives, gave her informal lessons on color theory, and attended every elementary and middle school production K co-starred in.  If it wasn't for a broken sewing machine and K's bratty, adolescent attitude, she would have taught K to sew as well.  Alas, that craft was to be learned later on...

An intensely demanding year of AP English made K never want to analyze another piece of writing ever again, so she abandoned her thoughts of becoming a writer to become a music video director.  She grabbed her college's course book and began looking for film and directing classes.  There weren't many in film, but their were a few for directing in the Theatre Arts department.  K naively auditioned for the theatre department, never realizing that once accepted she would either have to double-major in English and Theatre Arts or switch her major completely.  She switched her major.

Arriving to her first day of college K expected to throw herself into the art of acting and directing, instead her Stagecraft instructor put a pneumatic nail gun in her hands while the department's costume designer stuck her in front of a sewing machine.  That was the day K fell in love with stagecraft and design.  By the last show of the year (The Children's Hour), K had immersed herself into so much backstage production that she was tapped for a work study position in the scene painting shop.

Over the next few years K learned more and more about stagecraft and design, getting position mainly as prop master or charge artist.  She began her gypsy-style theater life the summer after her junior year.  She interned in the properties department of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, traveled three days by Greyhound bus to be the properties intern for the Berkeley Repertory Theater, finished her final year of college, ending with a short summer stint at the Berkshire Theater Festival.

Circumstance took her back home to Peoria where she worked two jobs and saved her pennies to move to New York City.  In the summer of 2002 her daydreams of the Big Apple rat race came true, but K soon realized that she was not the same rat she was in college and she dropped out of the race.

HOWEVER, K never lost her creative desire!  A few years after moving she taught herself how to knit.  Knitting led her back to crochet, crochet back to cross-stitch, cross-stitch back to sewing, sewing to embroidery and beyond.

K now sees her crafting as something between a hobby and a career.  It gives her an amazing sense of accomplishment and the fulfillment she's been looking so hard to find.

She currently lives in Brooklyn has three awesome roommates, takes care of her adorably sweet cat Bart, and carries on the family tradition of worshiping the Chicago Bears.


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