Maggie Pace
Maggie Pace owner and founder of the felted knit design company, Pick Up Sticks!, Started 2003, when she was five months pregnant with her second child. After working as a journalist for 10 years, Maggie was ready for something new. In keeping with family tradition – every female member of her family had a craft business going back two generations – and because she had just discovered felting it seemed a logical career step.

She found herself madly knitting gigantic, grocery-sized bags and shrinking them down into exciting smaller shapes. What she loved most was the transformation of the fibers: she could take a standard-looking wool handknit and turn it into a brand new textile, stiff, yet soft to the touch, with all the colors blending as if they had always been a single material. She was hooked, and literally felted everything that wasn't pinned down. She enlisted her mom, Joan to be her business partner, and together they marched down to city hall and got a business license.
Two weeks later, fate dealt a surprising blow: Maggie was hospitalized due to complications with her pregnancy. There, doctors told her if she wanted to save the baby, she had to lie flat on her back for the next four months. No sitting, no working, no running after her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter. It was from this mandatory confinement that the first line Pick Up Sticks! designs were born right along with her son, who entered the world full term and perfectly healthy.

Today Pick Up Sticks! patterns and kits are sold at stores nationwide and Maggie has written two books on knitted felt, Felt Forward (Interweave Press, Nov. 2007) and Felt It! (Storey, Nov 2006). Maggie was noted as a 2008 Women Entrepreneur for Country Living Magazine. She has appeared on several national and local television programs, including DIY Network's Knitty Gritty and PBS's Shay Pendray's Needlearts Studio. Maggie continues to design all the patterns and Joan tests each one. The mother / daughter team runs the business from a little studio in Oakland, California.
www.pickupsticksonline.com

Drew Emborsky
Drew Emborsky's quirky title as "The Crochet Dude" and his kitschy tongue-in-cheek designs have propelled him from a young, unknown fiber artist to the cutting edge of the fiber design world. His unique role as a male knitter and crocheter has opened doors for other men who were stuck in the closet with their yarn, knitting needles, and crochet hooks.

Robyn Chachula
Robyn Chachula's winding path to her crochet career began as most, not in the industry, as a crafter. "So my day job, as an engineer, may seem like a far cry from crochet fashion design, but for me, they are one in the same. They both use my ability to take a big project and break it down into little items that I can understand, then piece them back together for the overall big picture."

Her first published pattern was a simple leash created for Faye, her German Shepard. This spurred her on to start her own crochet design company, Crochet by Faye. She has been published in a number of national magazines and books, including Interweave Crochet and Crochet Today!

Her first crochet book, Blueprint Crochet: Modern Designs for the Visual Crocheter, will be available from Interweave Press in September 2008. Her second book, Mission Falls Goes Crochet, follows shortly this fall by Mission Falls Yarn. You can see all of her architecturally inspired pieces at www.crochetbyfaye.com.

Kristin Nicholas
An all-around decorative artist, Kristin, who resides in the hills of Western Massachusetts, is an author, illustrator, knitwear designer, photographer and potter as well as a lifelong knitter. Her mediums of self-expression also include creative endeavors such as stitchery, home furnishings, painting, interior design and gardening.