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\project proj_fingerlooping
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\chapter[background]{Background information}

I'm a native Finn in my early forties. I've studied Scandinavian languages and history at the University of Helsinki, but got an interesting job as a linguist before finishing my degree. That job expired when the IT bubble burst around the turn of the millennium, but soon after I was offered a position with my current employer, a Finnish hi-tech company manufacturing measuring instruments for process industry. I work as Documentation Manager, collecting and compiling information from various sources into instruction manuals and other documentation on instruments and processes related to them. While my work has nothing to do with fibers or textiles or braiding, it has given me the opportunity to learn a lot especially about computers and typesetting that I wouldn't otherwise know.

I have no formal training whatsoever in either teaching or textiles. I think I must have been born with teaching genes, because I remember teaching maths to my classmates in my early teens, and already then I made observations on how differently people learn. Formally my teaching career consists of teaching basic computing at the University of Third Age at the Open University in Helsinki in 1997-2001. After that I've only taught informally, mostly lucetting, fingerloop braiding - and then the basics of Renaissance dance.

I wasn't good at crafts as a child, I was a bit clumsy and slow, and thus always behind. Finnish schools still have obligatory craft classes, but I preferred woodwork with the boys to doing textile crafts with the girls in the class. Still, I liked playing with yarn, and I remember teaching myself braiding out of a book Mum brought me when I was home sick. The oldest braid samples I have originate from the time before my youngest brother was born, so I can't have been more than about 12 years old at that time - and those braids are evenly worked, so I wasn't totally hopeless even then. But I've really matured late as crafter, and even now I know more about theory than practice.

I returned to doing and learning narrow wares via my interest in history and my participation in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and that's where most of my work has gone, to be forwarded as gifts and prizes. Only lately I've started to widen my perspectives and taken a step toward teaching outside of that group and I find it refreshing for a change. I'm fascinated by the colours and patterns that can be created, but also by the structures and rules governing the outcome. I admit to taking pride in being able to introduce crafters to skills they aren't familiar with, fingerloop braiding being one of them alongside lucetting and sprang. To me, a crafting skill is not complete until it has been shared!


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