Jenessa Keller
Community Manager
Strengths:
Jenessa has an entrepreneurial spirit and loves helping other creative business owners find systems and automations that make their lives easier, freeing up their creative time. She loves to try out new tech, meet new people, and try new hobbies (this is where her business name Just1MoreThing comes from)
Background:
Jeness lives in Missouri with her partner Ben, their two kids, several cats (mousers are a necessity living in the middle of nowhere), and a mountain of stashed yarn. She taught herself to knit in college, where she studied Agricultural Development and Marketing. Fiber arts was simply a hobby as she pursued a traditional corporate job in advertising, working with clients like Tyson, French’s, and other food-service companies. After realizing that corporate life was not for her, she moved back to rural Missouri and began exploring an entrepreneurial path.
In 2018, she started designing knitting patterns and, shortly after, became a community manager for Francoise Danoy’s SWATCH Circle. Her Virtual Assistant business took off in 2020, with the pandemic helping artists who usually promoted their work in public find their online audiences. Jenessa continues to design knitting patterns, but these days she considers her VA business her “day job.”
Something you should know:
When she taught herself to knit, she did it all “wrong.” This was before the era of helpful YouTube tutorials, and the book's illustrations were not great. The result was a unique knitting style in which she worked her stitches off the right-hand needle from left to right. While she eventually learned to knit in a more traditional way in order to teach others, Jenessa chose to stick with her unique, left-handed, mirrored continental knitting style. That choice wasn’t without its challenges. Reading patterns required a lot of mental gymnastics, causing her to constantly edit, revise, or remake them to get the results she wanted. Now that she designs patterns, she keeps in mind how differently everyone knits and tries to accommodate those differences by providing clear explanations and both written and charted instructions.
Outside of the FBC:
Jenessa is a passionate advocate for gun violence prevention and raising awareness for suicide prevention. She has volunteered with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America since 2018, led the Missouri chapter from 2022 to 2025, and leads the organization's national Rural Caucus.