About Me

My real name is Caroline, but all my friends call me Caz. In the online world, people know me as “Gatchacaz”.

I was born in 1972 in Durban, South Africa, but have lived in the

for most of my life. I have one brother and one sister, and a cat called Hardy! I live in a 2-bedroom flat with my wonderful fiancé, Mike.

I have been working in the legal profession for 13 years, and I’m currently training to be a Legal Executive, but this is no where near as much fun as designing cross-stitch patterns!!!

I’ve been drawing all my life, but I only started cross-stitching eight years ago after I took my mum to a cross-stitch show in Manchester. I’d always wanted to have a go myself and so I bought myself some small kits and supplies to get me started. I started stitching my first piece (a dinosaur) that evening and I was so hooked, that I haven’t stopped since!!!

I started messing about at designing in 2003, my first piece being the Gatchaman Bird Logo. It was rather rough and worked freehand without a chart. It was only much later that I charted the image properly. Another early design was the DD Logo that I did to coincide with Duran Duran’s comeback tour in 2004. Again designed freehand, the original design has since gone missing, but I have re-designed/stitched it more recently!

It wasn’t until 2007 that I started to take the designing more seriously. My dad had bought some charting software (Jane Greenoff’s Pattern Maker 2) that he had hoped to use to design some patterns. He didn’t, so I took the liberty to install a copy on my laptop, and away I went!

Choosing a subject material wasn’t that difficult – as people who regularly watch me over on deviantART will know, most of the work in my gallery is either anime or video-game related (some of it goes back to the early 1990’s). My favourite game is Square Enix’s epic RPG, Final Fantasy VII and being a fan-girl of the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife, it was fairly obvious who was going get the stitchy treatment first and "Cloud in Stitches" was born!!! The pattern was reasonably easy to chart and fun to stitch so more FFVII characters have followed suit (with more to come).

The pattern proved so popular that I was approached by a girl I knew over on deviantART called "Little Mojo". She had a website that hosted patterns of anime and video-game characters. She had been after a Cloud Strife design for her site for sometime and was so impressed with mine that she asked permission to host it!

How could I refuse her offer?

The pattern proved to be very popular and the sequel "Zack in Stitches" soon followed suit and was being hosted by the site. Sadly last year, the site vanished from internet and attempts to contact Little Mojo did not prove successful. I hope wherever she is in the world she is doing okay, but my patterns were now homeless, as were those of other people who had patterns on her site.

At this time some of my other DA friends started stitching blogs to host their patterns. It seemed like the way forward so in June 2009 I set up "Gatchastitch" to host small patterns and feature the work in progress of some of my larger projects.

I try to update it regularly, but this all depends on whether I have anything interesting to say!

My blog started hosting small patterns, but I realised that my charting software of choice was outdated and not really up to the task of creating professional looking patterns. Most of my DA friends use Hobbyware's Pattern Maker software and it came highly recommended so in October 2009 I treated myself to a copy of the professional version.

What can I say about this program other than it's pretty fantastic! Not only has it got a fairly up-to-date palette of all the major thread manufacturers, but it has a pretty neat export function that allows me to create my patterns and it can convert thread colours from Anchor to DMC and back again!

The downside to using Blogger is that I can only host patterns in .JPG format. With some of my patterns being fairly large, trying to create a good looking pattern without the loss in resolution was tricky. Not only that, but I'm no good with computer art packages and my editing skills suck!

Again, other friends had started their own websites and again, there were offers to host my patterns. This time I declined, not because I was being mean, but because I decided that if my patterns were going to be up on the web, then I wanted control of them. I planned to start this website in the New Year, but 2010 has been a shitty year for me and other things have got in the way of starting this.

Eventually, on the 24th September 2010, "Gatchastitch the Website" was born!

After weeks of teething problems, it's up and running and there are plenty of patterns for you to sink your teeth into with more to come in due course.