The Day I Officially Became a Color Alchemist

Betting on myself after the algorithm ignored me

In March of this year, I made it official. I was done looking for a corporate job. Kaleidotoes was my job. I was now a full-time hand-dyed yarn business owner, color alchemist, and let’s be honest, person who now has a completely justifiable reason to own this much yarn.

It felt exciting. It felt terrifying. And it felt, if I’m being completely honest, like something that had already been decided for me when I received an email telling me that the job they were creating for me, the one that really was a perfect fit, was now on hold due to budget reasons.

Today’s Job Search

Let me back up to August of last year. After a long career in corporate America, my entire department was laid off.

I want to be careful here, because what I’m about to say is something a lot of people feel and very few people say out loud: I am in my early sixties, I have decades of hard-won experience, and I am fairly certain that the AI systems designed to surface the best candidates were doing something else entirely with my resume.

I know. You’re not supposed to be able to filter for age. And yet. When you send out hundreds of resumes over eight months and receive a fraction of responses, when you watch the same job posting cycle through under slightly different titles... the math is not mathing.

None of that showed up in the algorithm’s output. Frustrating doesn’t quite cover it. Enraging is probably most accurate.

My Outlet that was also a Side Hustle

Here’s the thing about eight months of job searching that nobody tells you: it takes more time than an actual job. The applications, the tailoring, the research, the waiting, the following up, the waiting some more. It is relentless and largely thankless work.

So I dyed yarn.

Kaleidotoes wasn’t new. It was a side hustle I had been doing for several years, though certainly not with the regularity or focus that running it as a real business would require. But during those eight months it became something else. I was refining techniques, organizing methods, playing more with color combinations. I was building systems and workflows and a real business framework underneath what everyone else probably thought was just a hobby keeping me busy between job applications.

I felt creative. I felt alive. I felt excited to start every single day. The contrast between those two emotional states was impossible to ignore.

The Skills I Brought With Me

One of the lines on my resume, the one the algorithm apparently found uninteresting, was that I bring order to chaos. Which is, it turns out, exactly the skill set perfectly matched to running a small business.

In addition to all the corporate skills, I brought a lifetime of entrepreneurial experience. Years of retail jobs. A graphic design and calligraphy business. An online catalog that was equal parts product and community. Years of working in web design and related technology, then moving into project organization and frameworks that actually work. And through it all, raising a family, wearing multiple hats, learning how to balance creative work with systems thinking, how to build community at scale, how to take something from idea to execution.

Kaleidotoes wasn’t a random pivot. It’s the natural convergence of everything I’ve learned to do.

The planning systems, the bookkeeping, inventory management, social media strategy, online sales, event logistics, customer relationships... none of that happens by accident. Kaleidotoes runs the way it does because of everything I’ve built before, not in spite of it. Every workflow I created, every community I fostered, every framework I taught gets applied here.

The skills didn’t disappear when the algorithm couldn’t find them. They just needed a different destination.

And then there’s the other side of it. Because while I bring order to the business side of things, I have fully embraced bringing chaos to the colors. I stopped asking permission from the color wheel and leaned into what was unpredictable.

Order and chaos. Turns out I needed both all along.

The Leap That Was Already In Progress

It became official the moment I said it out-loud to my husband, my kids, my friends. I’m done looking. I’m going all in on Kaleidotoes.

The first day of going all in was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. I won’t pretend there wasn’t impostor syndrome. There was. But not in the way I expected. It wasn’t “oh my god, what am I doing?” It was more like... how do I organize my entire life around this instead of just doing it on weekends or when I feel like it?

Because here’s the thing: I had been dyeing yarn seriously for years. I knew what I was doing. What I didn’t know was how to wake up with a schedule instead of a whim. How to measure success against standards I set myself instead of ones handed down from above. I had been my own boss before, I knew that territory. What was different this time was the vulnerability of betting everything on something I loved.

Turns out I’m a very tough boss.

But here’s what I discovered: I’m also a very happy employee.

What the Other Side Looks Like

A few official months in, here’s what I can tell you.

Yes, I work harder now than I ever did in corporate America. I start early in the morning and I’m still going at nine or ten at night. But it’s more than the hours, the work is circular, it lives in my head. I’m constantly refining, following up, carrying all of these things forward. There’s no five o’clock moment where I hand everything off to myself and say, here you go, boss! This is a career that doesn’t sleep.

But here’s what’s different: I am noticeably happier. My family sees it. My friends see it. I feel lighter. More joyful. More alive.

There is a kind of fulfillment at the end of a day spent doing work you love that nothing else can fully replicate. When someone picks up a skein of yarn and their face does that thing, that little moment of recognition and delight, it is worth more than I know how to calculate.

I loved my corporate career. The people I worked with. The teams I built and led. The colleagues who became friends. The satisfaction of solving hard problems together. I’m not pretending none of that mattered. It did, and I miss parts of it quite a bit.

But when I look back at what I’ve done with my life, I want to make sure it wasn’t all just work without something emotionally sustaining in return. And right now, covered in dye and surrounded by yarn and building something that is entirely, beautifully mine, I can tell you it isn’t.

Confirmation and Affirmation

Not everyone can do this. Not everyone should. Passion doesn’t always pay the bills, and betting on yourself is genuinely scary even when you’re confident and experienced and you’ve done it before.

But if you’re standing at that door wondering whether to open it, if you have something you love that’s been waiting patiently in the background, I hope this is a small nudge.

Life is too short to keep asking a system that can’t see you to validate what you already know.

Work life balance is the buzzword of today. But for me, I’ve found something better. When your work is your passion, the separation between the two dissolves. That changes everything.