As you are growing your tech-editing business, it's smart to think about how you will handle the work you will need to do from the first inquiry to final invoicing. If you do your best at tech editing, you will soon have many clients. If your clients are happy with your work, you might get lots of work from them and they might refer you to other designers. Having a system in place and knowing what to do at each step of the tech-editing process will help relieve stress and allow you to focus on doing the best job you can do.

Magazine work, in general, is a bulk of patterns given to you at once. There's a lot of editing to do and you are making all the corrections. When you work with a designer, in general, you're just pointing out errors to the designer. The designer is making the corrections and sending a corrected proof back to you for you to then recheck and approve.

What is the true job and responsibility of the technical editor of patterns? I thought our job was to make sure the pattern was correct as written, that what was printed on the page worked out mathematically and was easy to follow, and it is that—but is that all? Are they the numbers the designer wants, just because the math works out? Is it our job to know what the designer wants, to question what is in front of us?

The truth is, you can become a tech editor no matter what your current work/life situation is and no matter what your background is.