About Us

Welcome to Pin & Pine — a small cabin-in-the-woods of a website where crochet hooks and forest trails meet. If you've landed here from a pattern for a chanterelle-colored octopus or a daisy-square blanket, you already know what we're about: handmade things that are honest about the real world they come from, made slowly, and explained the way a good friend would explain them, over tea, with no shortcuts skipped.

How Pin & Pine started

My name is Greta Lindholm, and I'm the person behind every pattern, every plant-dye pot, and every slightly too-long story about moss you'll find on this site. I spent eighteen years as a park ranger and environmental educator with Washington State Parks, teaching kids to tell a chanterelle's gills from a false chanterelle's and grown-ups to slow down enough to notice either. Long before that, I was a girl at my Swedish Mormor's kitchen table in Tacoma, learning to crochet in the tradition of slöjd — the old Scandinavian belief that making something useful and beautiful, with your own hands and without hurrying, is a way of living rather than a hobby. Her motto still hangs over my desk: slow hands, long thoughts. It closes nearly everything I write, because it's the truest thing I know about this craft.

Pin & Pine is where those two tables — the ranger station and Mormor's kitchen — finally sit side by side. I design amigurumi and crochet patterns that are nature-accurate on purpose, so that making a little elephant, an octopus, or a puppy also teaches you something real about the species itself. Every pattern is field-tested in my own cedar-shingled house at the edge of Olympia, Washington, usually with my husband Erik (a biology teacher who fact-checks my animal details more than he'll admit), my kids Freja and Nils wandering through, and Juniper, our elderly border collie, supervising every yarn photo whether she's invited or not.

What you'll find here

This site lives mostly in a handful of categories, and I try to keep each one doing honest work rather than filling space:

• Crochet & Amigurumi — nature-inspired patterns, from a field-tested puppy to a tiny octopus pulled from tide-pool memories, written so a confident beginner can actually finish them.
• Rustic DIY & Seasonal DIY — projects that follow the calendar and the woods outside my door, not a trend cycle.
• Home Decor & Craft Room & Organization — practical ways to store yarn, display finished pieces, and keep a slow-craft habit sustainable long-term.
• Others — plant-dyeing tutorials from my own garden, and the odd essay on why making things slowly still matters.

Every project on Pin & Pine is genuinely made, photographed, and tested in my own home before it's published — not sourced from a stock library or written to fill a content calendar. If a pattern is fiddly or a dye batch is unpredictable, I say so.

Our editorial approach

I want this site to feel inspiring on a Sunday afternoon and useful on a Tuesday night when you actually have yarn in your lap and twenty minutes to spare. That means clear stitch counts, honest difficulty ratings, and notes on what I'd change next time — not vague inspiration with no way to actually finish the thing. You can read more about exactly how I test, rate, and fact-check patterns and nature details on the Editorial Policy page, which lays out the standards behind every post.

Because some links on this site support the small-batch, slow-craft way I run Pin & Pine, I keep that relationship fully transparent — you can see how on the Disclosure and Affiliate Disclaimer pages. I also take your privacy seriously, and you're welcome to read exactly what that means on the Privacy Policy page.

Who this site is for

Pin & Pine is for the person who wants their crochet basket to mean something — who likes knowing that the mushroom on their amigurumi is actually shaped like the real thing, or that the dye in their yarn came from onion skins in a real backyard. It's for beginners who want patterns that don't assume ten years of experience, and for slower crafters who've been at this as long as I have and just want good, unfussy company.

Get in touch

I answer my own inbox, slowly but surely, so if you've made one of the patterns, spotted a nature detail I should double-check, or just want to talk about mushrooms, reach out at [email protected] or through the Contact page. I also share finished projects, dye experiments, and behind-the-scenes trail photos over on Pinterest, if you'd like to follow along between posts.

Thank you for slowing down here for a while. Whatever you're making next — slow hands, long thoughts.