Alicia Kachmar

I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."

-William Blake

A teacher turned freelance writer, crafter, and all-around DIY-er, Alicia Kachmar enjoys crocheting safety cones, mixing martinis, playing pool, biking around New York City and baking pies. She grew up in a creative and crafty household in the great city of Pittsburgh, sewing and baking before she had really mastered reading. With a Day of the Dead birthday, Alicia planned elaborate Halloween parties where she would figure out precisely how to cut the cake so that each guest got equally-sized pieces. She spent a lot of time in Joann Fabrics and at her basement "work desk," collaging, painting rocks, making candles, papier-macheing animals and convincing her mom that, yes, I *am* going to make something with all of this lint and can we buy vermiculite and blue-gray corduroy tomorrow?

Most of these crafty interests took a backseat to a busy career as a New York-based museum educator/nanny/school teacher. Until health travails resulted in a sort of early retirement and twiddling-thumbs-time-in-bed became her daily routine. She taught herself to crochet and began to dabble in all those favorite crafts from childhood.

One thing led to the next and she opened an Etsy shop, creating an entire crochet wonderland of frowning s'mores, happy balloons and everything in between. This led to a lot of fun conversations and anecdote-exchanging as well as custom crochet requests like a line of cheeses, a yule log and a ukulele. Alicia designs for such magazines as Knit Simple and Crochet Today, has participated in multiple Plush You! shows in Seattle, writes for Brooklyn Based and Tribeca Citizen and recently won the 2010 Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America UC Success writing contest.

"What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day."

-Marcel Proust

"A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cotton cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful."

-Octavio Paz

http://aliciakachmar.com/

http://www.etsy.com/shop/EternalSunshine