The January/February, 2022 issue of Yale Alumni Magazine featured several alumni who pivoted in their career path, including Colorado’s Anne Weil ’94:

“Crafting a different future”

Anne Weil ’94 was sitting in a windowless conference room in San Antonio, Texas, under flickering lights, doing what she did so well: sealing a real estate deal. She’d been in banking and real estate finance virtually since college, and she was good at it—detail-oriented and hardworking, even though she didn’t have the passion others had for this particular moment. In fact, she was thinking she didn’t want to spend her life this way.

Later, she tried other things—like a career break to study landscape architecture—but she kept returning to real estate asset management and investment analysis. Then, in 2012, 13 years after that Texas day, her husband was hired by the Baltimore Ravens. He said, “I have my dream job. You should pursue yours.”

Two years earlier, as she had always liked making and designing objects, she had begun flaxandtwine.com, a blog devoted to crafts. She loved every aspect of the blog—taking the photographs, writing project instructions, giving people, as she says, “time for their own creative life.” Now the blog was going to become a full-time endeavor, with advertisers, sponsored content, and an online shop with DIY kits for stylish baskets, bracelets, and other objects that are, as she puts it, “elevated to a modern aesthetic” and “not your grandmother’s crafts.”

It still took her nearly a year to close down her real estate career, but on the day she sold her final property, a publisher called to ask her to write a book. She found herself an agent and subsequently published Knitting Without Needles and Weaving Within Reach.

As much as she adores what she is doing, Weil realizes that she had been anxious about her performance before, often asking herself if she had enough information, if she had done enough work, and if people liked what she did. Though she clearly has been successful in both of her careers, she still pesters herself with such questions, but now she does so, she says, with “joy and excitement.”