On the next edition of Fiber Hooligan (06/09/14) my guest will be nationally known knitting instructor, Anne Berk. Anne was born in Grinnell, IA., and learned to knit at age 8, from her friends’ mom. She did lots of crafts, growing up… crochet, embroidery, counted cross-stitch, macramé, sewing. She moved to Portland, OR at age 10. In college, she was a camp counselor at Camp Namanu in Sandy, OR, and was a craft director for a few summers. Her main interest besides school and crafts was singing, playing guitar, and writing songs, and she worked her way through college and grad school by performing (weddings, restaurant sets, musical theater, etc.).
Anne majored in Natural Science at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR, pre-med. Her junior year was spent studying abroad, in Ireland, where her interest in fiber arts was re-kindled. While there, she knit and crocheted all year, but on returning to the States, she didn’t have time or resources to keep it up, and went back to studying (and singing) full-time.
Anne attended Pacific Univ. College of Optometry in Forest Grove, OR, becoming an Optometric Physician in 1985, and also married Bill Berk, a fellow student, that same year. They set up private practice together in Portland, and expanded to a second office in Clackamas a few years later. They now live in Clackamas and still run both practices full-time.
When her now grown children started school, she felt the urge to start crafting again. She did a lot of needlework, and decided to start knitting, also. When Anne ran out of space on the walls for the needlework, she got serious about knitting, and decided to enroll in the TKGA Master Handknitting program. As she worked through the program, a patient of hers, who owned an LYS, asked if she would be interested in teaching in her store. It turned out that she not only enjoyed teaching… she was pretty good at it. By the time she graduated from the Master Handknitting program in 2003, she was teaching at events in the Northwest, and had a busy sideline doing commission work for yarn store customers who needed hand-knits finished, repaired, restored, or custom-made.
She is a problem-solver by nature, which makes her a very good doctor, and has also informed her path as a knitter. She builds knitting courses based on problems that knitters have, trying to solve issues in the most efficient way possible.
For the past three years she has been working on her self-published book, Annetarsia Knits, a hardcover, 224 page resource for intarsia instruction at every level.
Anne has to be one of the busiest people I know. But she’s going to take a break from her practice to tell us her story and talk to us about her new book. I hope you’ll join us for what I know will be a fun show.
