About Gaynor
Gaynor is a crochet-obsessed teacher and pattern designer from Wokingham in Berkshire.
She learned to knit and crochet as a child, trained and worked as a French teacher for over 10 years, and then picked up her hook again 10 years ago. Gaynor jokes that she is “lucky enough to call myself a full-time hooker…”
In 2012, Gaynor set up The Barkham Hookers crochet group with a few friends in her living room. They now run 4 group sessions a week as well as many regular private lessons with over 600 members on Facebook alone. You can find them on Facbook via The Barkham Hookers’ Charity Group, where many of their charity projects can be seen.
She is very proud of the fact that The Barkham Hookers raised over £60,000 for various national and international charities, £52,000 of that for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. Click here to watch Gaynor share a quick and easy method for crocheting a poppy.
Gaynor loves designing and making blankets, many of which can be found as free CALs (crochet-a-longs) on her blog: Confessions of a Barkham Hooker. During the pandemic, she designed the Coronavirus CAL, posting a new section daily then weekly with colourful pictures and detailed notes.
Signature Technique
Crochet Blankets incorporating a variety of patterns and colours
Top Tips
- Crochet is very forgiving. Don’t be afraid to adjust or change the pattern to suit your needs or likes. And remember, if in doubt pull it out!
- Use a larger hook to work a long foundation chain to avoid it curling up.
- If you work quite loosely choose a slightly smaller hook than advised and a larger hook if you work tightly.
- When working in rows do not forget to work into the last stitch – – which is probably the chain 2/3 made at the start of the previous row.
- Use military buttons as the centre in poppies to add something special.
- If you are working with several balls of yarn, chuck them on the floor and let gravity help you keep them untangled.
Videos
Patterns
Posts
Miniature joy
One of our lovely members Viv had chatted to Valerie at the West Country Quilt show in Bristol last year about Julia Gahagan's Miniature quilts. She was busy making this lovely alpine village pattern and was learning how to do it from Julia's video on our site. She was determined to finish it by Christmas - and she did.
She told us has really enjoyed making it and we agree with everyone who she has shown it to, that it is a very pretty piece of work - Very well done indeed Viv!!!
5 May 2017
New Videos Every Friday Postcard quilt from Valerie Nesbitt [...]
Filming with Carolyn Forster
What a great day we had together with Carolyn last week and we have some really lovely workshops ready for editing; Carolyn spent the day sharing with us her 'Joy of Sewing' and we have a whole series of workshops on how to sew patchwork by hand - a great alternative to EPP and not a stitch in sight! She also showed us how to design cable quilting which you can customize for your own quilt size; there is a super quick layer-cake bag and a wonderful woven scrap quilt too (see picture below).