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
Happy sewing with friends in Bristol
Am at the Aztec West hotel just outside Bristol (part of the Shire Hotels & Spa group) with friends sewing for the whole weekend - how blissful is that: car issues on arrival but now all sorted. Here are Carol Liebzeit and Chris Porter busy with their work in Progress: Carol is due to teach at Midsomer Quilting next week - split 9 patch - which will be bright and zinggy - Carol's signature colours.
Your comments
Thanks ladies, it is a brilliant website and so nice to now have the search button. Well done I love this site. Rosemary New site looks cool! Couple of jobs to do this evening then going to settle down for a 'play'!!!!! Keep up the good work, it is really appreciated. Kind regards Donna So glad I joined this community, lots of great information and fabulous videos.
Best regards
Sue Congratulations on the new website, not only looks good but is very user friendly.
Kind regards
Leoni Just loving your new website.
More filming for the site
We spent a very productive Sunday filming content for the site in the classroom of Creative Quilting (take a tour in the video). I was joined by textile artist, Valentina Brunn who shared with us some of her wonderful work as well as giving us a short workshop on how to create landscapes using bondaweb, paint and stitching – wait and see! She also uses tyvex to great effect and shows us how.