Author

Dana Whitlock

Hi, I'm Dana — let's talk about why your sweater doesn't fit. (Spoiler: it's not you.)

I'm Dana Whitlock: crocheter of 27 years, high school math teacher of 11, pattern-grading obsessive, and the numbers nerd behind Yarn Wren.

I learned to crochet at 12 from my Aunt Carol in Green Bay — a wonderful, no-nonsense woman who taught me every stitch and never once used a written pattern. Which meant I spent my teenage years reverse-engineering how shapes actually worked: why this many increases made a circle lie flat, why that many made it ruffle. I didn't know it at the time, but I was doing geometry. It would take me another two decades to realize those two loves were the same love.

In between, I got a mathematics degree and taught high school algebra and geometry for eleven years, fielding the question "when will we ever USE this?" approximately daily. This entire website is my longest answer to that question.

Here's the sweater story, because it's the origin of everything. In 2016, I crocheted my first garment from a popular published pattern. I swatched. I matched gauge. I followed every row exactly. And it fit like a sad rectangle with sleeves. The old me would have blamed my body or my skills — which is exactly what most makers do, every day, unfairly. But I'd been teaching geometry for a decade, so instead, I did the math. I measured the schematic. I calculated the ease. I checked how the sizes were graded. And I found the truth: the pattern was wrong. Above a size L, it hadn't been graded — it had been carelessly scaled up, like photocopying a picture bigger and calling it tailoring.

That sweater radicalized me. I spent two years teaching myself professional pattern grading and garment fit theory, filling notebooks with schematics. In 2019, I started Yarn Wren to publish what I'd learned. In 2022, I left the classroom to do this full-time. (The sad rectangle now hangs framed in my studio. Founding documents deserve respect.)

Here's what Yarn Wren promises you:


Real grading, really tested. Every garment I publish is drafted across nine sizes, XS–5X, with proportions adjusted — never just scaled — and test-crocheted in at least three sizes, always including above a 2X. My testers are credited by name.
Schematics on everything. Full measurements for every size, because a pattern without a schematic is a recipe without quantities.
The math, shown and scaffolded. Every calculation comes three ways: the formula, a worked example, and a plug-in worksheet. If "I'm bad at math" is your scar, you are my primary audience — eleven years of teaching taught me that scar is almost never a fact.
Public changelogs. When I make an error — and I do — the correction is logged openly on the pattern page, dated. No silent fixes, ever.
One core belief: the pattern should fit you. You should never have to fit the pattern.


I write from a sunroom studio in Madison, Wisconsin, where a house wren nests in the birdhouse outside my window every spring — a tiny, deafening supervisor who gave this blog its name. (Nine years of arrival dates logged. Yes, there's a graph.) I share the bungalow with my wife Joanne — physical therapist, curling teammate, and the blog's self-appointed 2X fit model, photographed with exactly the same care as every sample — and two elderly cats named Pythagoras and Euclid, because of course they are.

Whether you're here to make your first sweater, rescue a project that "should" fit but doesn't, or finally make peace with gauge — welcome. Bring your numbers. I brought worksheets.

May your gauge be true,
Dana