After a decades-long career in marketing, Wendy Bernard left her corporate life behind to raise her daughter as a stay-at-home-mom in 2002.

While staying at home with her baby, Wendy began knitting and blogging about her adventures at Knit and Tonic, a blog that she started in 2005 out of boredom and a desire to keep her thirst for writing alive. “While I blogged about adjusting existing knitting patterns, and showing off my results, readers kept asking me if I would begin designing and sharing my results,” Wendy says. “I read up on different techniques, threw myself into the whole thing, and next thing I knew, a literary agent contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write a book about knitting.”

In 2008, her first book, “Custom Knits” was published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, a division of Harry N. Abrams. Since then, she has written three more books, “Custom Knits 2,” “Custom Knits Accessories, and “Up, Down, All-Around Stitch Dictionary,” which is the first stitch dictionary of its kind, one that shows knitters how to re-create stitch patterns not only flat, but in the round and top down, which she says helps knitters to free up the critical part of their minds and have even more fun knitting.

Wendy lives in Southern California with her husband and daughter. Her favorite thing to do is hang out with them on the weekends and go to the beach to knit.