Privacy Policy

Stitch Obsession is a small, one-person crochet site. There is no account to make, no login, and no form standing between you and a pattern. Nothing on this page is written to make you feel comfortable about something we would rather you did not look at closely — it is a plain description of what happens, and you can check most of it yourself with your browser's developer tools.

The one place we hold anything

The newsletter is the only part of this site that stores personal information, and only if you type it in yourself. When you send the signup form, four things are saved:

• Your email address. Required — it is the whole point of the list.
• Your first name, if you gave one. Optional, and used only so the note can greet you properly.
• Which page you signed up from. A short path such as /home-newsletter. It tells us which parts of the shop people actually sign up from, so we know where the box is worth having.
• The IP address the signup came from. Recorded once, at the moment of signing up, as a defence against automated junk submissions. It is not used to build a profile, and it is not looked at again unless the list is being flooded by a bot.

The form also has two optional boxes for your experience level and the kinds of things you like making. Those are used to decide what to write about next, and nothing else.

What the list is used for

One thing: sending you a short note when a new free pattern goes up on the shelf, roughly once a week and never more. The list is not used for anything else, it is not lent to anyone, it is not rented to anyone, and it is not sold — not now, and not if the site ever changes hands. That last part matters: if Stitch Obsession were ever transferred to somebody else, the list would either come with a promise to honour this page or be deleted.

Leaving, and having your details erased

Every note carries an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and it works immediately. If you would rather not hunt for it, email hello@stitchobsession.com and say the word — we will remove the row and confirm it, normally the same week and always within 30 days. You can also ask what is held about you, or ask for it to be corrected, and the answer will be the short list above with your own values filled in.

You do not need to justify the request, and asking will not get you a “before you go” email sequence. There is no sequence.

What is NOT running on this site right now

At the time of the date at the top of this page, Stitch Obsession runs no analytics, no advertising tags, no social pixels and no third-party trackers of any kind. No Google Analytics, no advertising network, no heat-mapping, no session recording. Pages here load their own text, their own images, their own stylesheet and their own scripts, plus a web font from Google Fonts, and nothing else.

That means we cannot tell you how many people read a given pattern. We think that is a fair trade for now.

What would change if that ever changed

If measurement or advertising is ever switched on, it will happen in the open, not quietly:

• The date at the top of this page changes, and this section is rewritten to name the exact service.
• An analytics tool would collect the usual anonymous, aggregated things — page views, rough location by country, device type. Never your name, and never tied to your email address.
• An advertising network would set its own cookies from its own servers, under its own privacy policy, and the cookie policy would list them by name with the consent choices that go with them.
• Affiliate links, if any appear, are described on the affiliate disclosure page. A link like that tells the retailer that you arrived from here; it does not tell us who you are.

What will not change under any circumstances: no selling of personal information, and no pattern ever put behind an email box.

Messages you send us

If you email, or use the form on the contact page, the message sits in an ordinary mailbox so it can be answered and followed up. The contact form does not submit anything to this website — it opens a message in your own email program — and a contact message never adds you to the newsletter.

Where the data physically sits

The subscriber list lives in a single small database file on the same web host that serves this site, kept outside the public folder so it cannot be requested over the web. It is not synced to a marketing platform, a spreadsheet in the cloud, or anybody's customer database. It is a very short file, and it is kept only for as long as the list exists and you are on it.

Younger makers

Crochet is for everybody, and we are glad when a younger maker finds a pattern here. This site is not aimed at children under 16 though, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If a child has typed their address into the newsletter box, email hello@stitchobsession.com and it will be deleted straight away, with no questions and no confirmation loop.

Your rights, wherever you are

If you live under the UK or EU GDPR, or California's CCPA, you have the right to see what is held, to correct it, to have it deleted, and to object to it being used. Those rights are honoured here for everybody, regardless of where you live, because it would be strange to run two standards over a list this short. The lawful basis for holding your address is your own consent, given by sending the form, and you can withdraw it at any time.

Changes to this page

If anything here stops being true, this page gets rewritten and the date at the top changes with it. There are no quiet edits.