About
About Tamsin Okoro
One person, one kitchen table, and a wall of small finished things that keeps needing another row of pins.
I am Tamsin Okoro. I keep the basket. Everything on this site started in it, and most of it started badly.
What follows is how a pattern gets from my hook to your screen, and what I will not do to you along the way.
Tamsin, from the basket
Small things, on purpose
I make granny squares with a character in the middle - animals, a toadstool, a cupcake. Not because small is easy. Sewing a beak onto a duckling so it sits straight is nobody's idea of easy. Small is simply what fits in the gap I have: the forty minutes between clearing the plates and the moment my eyes give up. A blanket wants a whole season. A snail wants an afternoon.
So the basket fills with small things, and the small things end up here.
Why there is a website at all
For a long time my patterns lived on the backs of envelopes and in a notebook with a coffee ring on the cover. That was fine until a friend asked for the fox keyring and I had to photograph four pages of my own handwriting and hope she could tell an increase from a decrease. She could not. Fair enough — neither can I, some days.
So I typed one up properly. Then the next one. This site is that notebook, retyped, with the crossings-out left in wherever they turned out to be useful.
How a pattern gets made here
I make everything twice.
The first one is the rough draft. That is the round where I forgot the marker, the head that came out the size of an apple, the tail I sewed on backwards and had to unpick with the good scissors. I write almost nothing down on the first pass, because on the first pass I am guessing.
The second one is the one you get. I work it slowly, one line at a time, with the notebook open beside the hook, and that is the version that ends up on the page.
Every round on this site ends with a stitch count in a little coral pill, the way most crochet patterns are written. It tells you what you should have in your hands before you start the next round.
What is in every pattern
- A materials list with the hook and yarn that were in my hand, not the ones the ball band suggests.
- A crochet abbreviations block listing every abbreviation that pattern uses.
- US terms all the way through, spelled out the first time they appear.
- Every round on its own line, with the stitch count at the end of it.
- A time on the card that is my second attempt, honestly measured. Add half again if the stitch is new to you, and do not rush the sewing up.
What this site will never do
No pattern here sits behind an email box. The newsletter is just a newsletter: one small make every other Sunday, and you can walk away from it without explaining yourself.
You will not find star ratings on these pages, or a counter telling you how many people have made the hedgehog, or a quote from a stranger about how it changed their week. I have no honest way to know any of that, so it does not go on the page.
There are no adverts and no trackers. Nobody is buying your email address, mostly because there is nobody here but me and I would have to write the invoice myself.
And I will not call a pattern easy when it is not. If a round is fiddly, the pattern says so, usually with a note about how many attempts it took me to stop swearing at it.
Come and say hello
If you have a question about a pattern, you are welcome to write to hello@yarngallery.com or use the contact page. I read everything, eventually.
Otherwise, go and pick something out of the patterns. The kettle is on.
Tamsin, from the basket