2019-2024 Guild Webmaster – Kerry Nare
Meet Kerry Nare, webmaster and newest member of the Guild’s Executive Board. During the last quarterly meeting, the Executive Board voted unanimously to add the vital position of webmaster to its ranks.
Here’s her story in her own words:
“I was about eleven, home from school with bronchitis when my mother came in and tossed a McCall’s Needlecraft magazine in my lap along with a pair of Susan Bates needles and some yarn saying ‘here, if you’re going to do that stuff at least learn how to knit and make something useful.’ That stuff was pineapple pattern pot holders my grandmother had taught me to crochet (Boye #10 steel hook with KnitCroSheen cotton in two colors, in the round with bobbles).
“That McCall’s magazine had a few Barbie doll patterns and vague instructions with a few line drawings on how to knit. Nothing about how to hold the yarn. By studying the line drawings and the fabric of my knit pajamas (my eyesight for close-up work was much better in those days), I figured out that knitting was just a bunch of loops. Okay, so I could do this however I wanted. Holding my yarn in my left hand as my grandmother taught me, I proceeded. I knit back and forth without turning my work. After a few rows, I looked at what I had done and could see the stitches were twisted on every other row. I fixed that by turning all the loops in the same direction, placing them with the left leg to the front since that was easier for me. My first finished project was a rectangle in stockinette, folded and seamed to make a tube dress for a Barbie doll.
“That method served me well for years into adulthood. I made a pullover for myself in high school and several sweaters for my husband on long rides to his parents’ house outside Phoenix. Then I decided to tackle lace. I took a continental knitting class from Lorilee Beltman at Vogue Knitting Live in Century City, L.A. and learned to knit “properly”. It took me a year to settle into a new knitting style.
“Not long after, I retired and joined the Guild. After a few years, Karen des Jardins recruited me to handle the name badges which quickly became routine. After a few more years, I learned Sheila Kirschenbaum was looking for someone to replace her as webmaster.
“People occasionally ask me how I came to work on the website. I don’t really have a computer background, although I’ve had a few programming classes in FORTAN, a now-old scientific programming language. During my time at UC San Diego, the work environment evolved from typewriters and calculators to computer terminals, spreadsheets, PCs, and data bases. It was learn as you go. Among other things, I developed budgets for grant applications, reviewed and edited budget justifications and correspondence to agencies on behalf of faculty investigators, supervised staff, and did training. The work was heavily deadline-driven, and faculty are no better than students getting things done on time. Oh, and I learned a little HTML on the fly to create and post things on office websites.
“I started training with Sheila in the Spring of 2019, after returning from a knitting tour of Scotland, and quickly learned the position was not what I expected and was more involved. Around the beginning of 2019 (or maybe the end of 2018), the pdf version of the newsletter had gone away and the website became the main source of Guild information. Instead of a formatted newsletter, a monthly email announcement was to go out with links back to the website. When I tried referring to that announcement as the “newsletter”, I was quickly corrected by several people – there was no newsletter. I had to call it something so I could refer to it, so I labeled it the News Blast. You all know the rest. The website uses WordPress, designed by Sheila with help from an outside programmer. The News Blast uses a web service called Mail Chimp to create the Blast and email it out.
“My formal education: A.A. in Language Arts at Chaffey College, where I also took a class in FORTAN, a computer language. I transferred to UC San Diego where I graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Science.”
— Kerry Nare, Guild Webmaster.
