Privacy Policy

The short version

You can read every pattern on this site without giving us anything. We have no accounts, no logins, no comments and no ratings. Analytics cookies are off until you accept them. There are exactly two ways to give us personal information, both of which you have to choose: the contact form, which is emailed to us and stored nowhere, and the newsletter, which you have to confirm by email and can leave in one click.

The contact form

If you use the contact form, you give us your name, your email address, a subject line and your message. That is used for exactly one thing: replying to you.

• Submissions are delivered to our inbox by Resend, our email provider, who processes the message in order to deliver it.
• Nothing from the form is written to our database, and your address is never added to a mailing list or passed to anyone else.
• The message stays in our email account for as long as it is useful for handling your enquiry, and is deleted after that.
• To limit automated abuse, the form records the number of recent submissions from an IP address in server memory. That count is not stored, not linked to your message, and disappears within the hour.

The newsletter

If you sign up for the newsletter, we store your email address, the date you signed up, which page you signed up from, and the IP address the signup came from. The IP address is kept as evidence of consent — that is what lets us show you asked to be on the list — and is used for nothing else.

• We confirm first. Signing up sends one email asking you to confirm. Nothing else is ever sent until you click that link, and if you never do, the address is simply left unconfirmed and unused.
• Where it's stored. In our own database, and with Resend, who deliver the mail on our behalf. We do not sell, rent or share the list, and there is no advertising partner to share it with.
• Leaving is one click. Every email carries an unsubscribe link and supports your mail app's built-in unsubscribe button. It takes effect immediately, with no confirmation step and no follow-up asking why.
• Bounces and spam reports. If mail to your address hard-bounces, or you report us as spam, we record that and stop sending — permanently, in the case of a spam report.
• Deletion. Ask through the contact form and we'll delete your record outright rather than just marking it unsubscribed.

Our lawful basis for the newsletter is your consent, given at the moment you click the confirmation link, and you can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing.

Analytics and cookies

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which patterns people actually read and make — page views, roughly where in the world visitors are, and what kind of device they're on. We use it to decide what to write next, not to identify anyone.

Analytics cookies are switched off until you accept them. On your first visit a banner asks. Until you choose, and permanently if you decline, Google Consent Mode keeps analytics storage denied — which means no analytics cookies are written to your device and no identifier is kept between visits. We still receive an anonymous, aggregated count of visits in that state.

Your choice is remembered in your browser's local storage, not on our servers. Clearing your site data will make the banner ask again. There is no advertising network on this site, no social media pixel, no heatmapping and no cross-site tracking.

Google acts as our processor for this data. Their handling is covered by the Google Privacy Policy. Where analytics cookies are used, our lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser and declining when asked again.

Hosting and server logs

Like effectively every website, our hosting provider and content delivery network keep short-lived technical logs of requests — IP address, timestamp, the page requested, and the browser's user-agent string. These exist to serve pages, spot abuse and diagnose faults. We do not use them to build a profile of you, and we do not combine them with anything else.

Pattern photographs are delivered through Cloudinary, which receives the same kind of request data in order to serve the image.

Children

This site is a general-audience craft site and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.

Your rights (GDPR, UK GDPR)

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you have the right to ask for a copy of any personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable form. In practice the only personal data we are likely to hold is an email you sent us.

Our lawful basis for handling a contact-form message is legitimate interest: you asked us a question and we are answering it. To exercise any of these rights, write to us through the contact form. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

Your rights (California)

California residents have the right to know what personal information is collected and how it is used, the right to request deletion, and the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share personal information, and we never have. Exercising any of these rights will not get you a worse experience on this site.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially, the date at the top of the page is updated. Because the site is deliberately built to collect as little as possible, most changes will be additions — a new feature that needs to be described — rather than a change to how existing information is handled.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about data we might hold, go through the contact form.