About Kerioak
Kerioak is a one-person studio working out of a back room and a garden, somewhere in the UK. The same person makes the crochet, takes the photographs, paints the watercolours, and writes the blog. The studio is small on purpose and is likely to stay that way.
How the studio works
Three of the four lines of work are slow handcraft. A medium afghan blanket takes a few weeks. A shawl, four to six evenings. A pair of children's mittens, an afternoon. The photography is on the same rhythm: a walk in a particular field at a particular hour, a few frames worth keeping, several months sometimes before a set is ready. Nothing is mass-produced and nothing is rushed.
What's in the shop
The shop carries whatever has come off the bench recently. Pieces fall into a few groups:
- Crochet bags, hats, gloves, scarves, shawls, and stoles in wool, alpaca, and cotton.
- Blankets and afghans, sized from cot through to king. Custom palettes welcome.
- Children's pieces: hats, mittens, small blankets, tea-cosies for play kitchens.
- Crochet hooks and small accessories. A few favourite ones I use myself.
- Photography prints in small editions, framed or unframed, including the dog portraits and the swan series that get asked about most.
The photography side
The photography is mostly wildlife and the local landscape. Dogs (especially my own and the dogs of friends), swans on a particular stretch of river that the camera has visited many hundreds of times, garden birds, occasional larger trips for landscape work. Lightroom and Photoshop are part of the workflow but the goal is always to honour what was in front of the camera rather than to invent something that wasn't.
The blog
Posts go up irregularly. Subjects rotate: a crochet pattern that worked, a photo edit that took half a day, a wildlife sighting worth writing down, occasionally a small rant about a piece of software that broke something. Subscribe by email if you'd like to be told when a new one's up; otherwise the archive is always here to browse.
Commissions and custom work
Commissions are welcome in moderation. The studio takes on:
- Custom crochet pieces — usually a blanket in a chosen palette or a one-off shawl.
- Print orders — most photography prints can be sized or framed differently to standard listings.
- Occasional small art commissions — watercolour pet portraits especially, which tend to come in clusters around Christmas.
For larger commercial requests the studio is the wrong fit — there are excellent makers who do that work full-time. Kerioak is small, slow, and personal.
Where to find me online
Kerioak appears on Instagram, on a small Etsy shop when it's open, and very occasionally on photography forums. The website is the canonical home, the place where everything links back to. Direct email is the best way to reach me about anything substantive.
Contact
Email [email protected]. Replies usually within a few days, sometimes faster, occasionally slower if the photography has me away from a desk for a while.