How to read a crochet pattern

What a round line says

A written pattern is a list of rounds, and every line has the same three parts in the same order: which round it is, what to work into it, and how many stitches you should have when the line is finished — the number in square brackets at the end. Work the line, count what is on the hook, compare it with the bracket. If the two agree, the round is right. If they do not, the fault is inside the last round you worked, and it is findable.

This is round 3 of the shell top on the sea turtle, printed the way its page prints it.

The arithmetic is small and it is worth doing once. Round 2 ended on 12. Round 3 works 6 increases into those 12 stitches, and an increase puts two stitches where there was one, so 12 + 6 = 18. Every bracket on every page of this site is that sum, run round after round.

The abbreviations

A written pattern is short forms and numbers, and the short forms are the half that stops a reader. There are two lists here: what these patterns use, which is small, and what a pattern from anywhere else is likely to use, which is not.

What the patterns here use

Every pattern on this site prints its own key at the top of the page. These are the ones on the sea turtle, and they are close to the whole vocabulary.

mr

magic ring

sc

single crochet

inc

increase — 2 single crochet in one stitch

dec

decrease — single crochet 2 together

st(s)

stitch, or stitches

Under the short forms the count has only three operations. Across 113 patterns, 467 parts and 5,734 rounds, every one of the 104,230 instructions in this library is recorded as a single crochet, an increase or a decrease — 94,878, 6,215 and 3,137 of them. A few lines name something else: a foundation chain or a slip stitch to join is recorded as single crochet, because the format has nothing else to count it with. That is a limit rather than a simplification: three operations are what lets a machine chain the counts round against round, and they are also why there is no openwork, no granny square and no lace here yet.

What a pattern from anywhere else uses

None of the list below is a claim about a pattern on this site. It is the conventional set of short forms in the US written system, for the printout in your other hand. The stitch names in it are the ones the table two sections down puts against their British equivalents, which is where the same letters stop meaning the same stitch.

ch

chain

sl st

slip stitch

sc

single crochet

hdc

half double crochet

dc

double crochet

tr

treble crochet

dtr

double treble crochet

yo

yarn over — wrap the yarn round the hook

st, sts

stitch, stitches

sp

space — the gap between stitches, not the stitch itself

sk

skip — miss the next stitch, in UK patterns written "miss"

rep

repeat

beg

beginning

tog

together — two stitches closed into one

BLO, FLO

back loop only, front loop only — work under one loop of the stitch, not both

RS, WS

right side, wrong side — the face of the fabric that will show, and the other one

MC, CC

main colour, contrast colour

FO

fasten off — cut the yarn and pull the tail through the last loop

The number in brackets

[48] at the end of a round is how many stitches are on the piece when that round is finished — the whole round, not the stitches the line told you to make. It is a running total, so it is also the number the next round starts from.

Count at the end of every round, not at the end of every third one. A round that comes out one short is a missed increase somewhere in the last thirty seconds of work; three rounds later it is a missed increase somewhere in a hundred and fifty stitches, and the shape has already started to pull.

Keeping count takes this further: what to do when your number and the bracket disagree, and how to find the stitch.

US terms or UK terms

There are two systems of stitch names and they are offset by one step, so the same word means a different stitch depending on who wrote the pattern. A US dc is a UK tr; a UK dc is a US sc. Nothing in the letters says which system is in use, and a pattern that does not state it can only be told apart by reading it.

112 of the 113 patterns here define sc as single crochet in their own key, and it is the stitch nearly every round is worked in; a few also use a foundation chain or a slip stitch to join. That is the US name for it; a British pattern calls the same stitch dc, which is the third row below and the only one that bites on this site. Note what is not being said: no field on these records states which system a pattern uses and no check tests one, so the key is the evidence and the system is an inference from it.

Swap the names in a pattern you have

This runs the table above over whatever you paste in, once, and tells you what it changed. It cannot tell you which system the pattern uses — that is the part no substitution solves, and running it the wrong way turns a correct pattern into a wrong one without saying so. It does not touch numbers, round labels or repeat brackets. Read what it reports rather than trusting the result.

Rows, rounds and spirals

A row is flat: you work to the end, turn the piece and come back. A round goes on around the piece without turning, which is what makes a tube or a ball rather than a rectangle. Of the 467 parts in this library, 466 are worked in the round and 1 is flat.

Amigurumi rounds are usually a spiral: nothing is joined at the end of the round, so the first stitch of round 8 goes straight into the last stitch of round 7 and there is no seam. The cost is that no round has a visible start. A marker in the first stitch of the round, moved up as you pass it, is what replaces the seam — and it is what makes the bracket count checkable at all.

Making a pattern bigger

The counts do not change. A pattern is a shape written in stitches, and working more of them changes the shape rather than the size — a disc that gains six a round has to go on gaining six a round or it stops lying flat. What changes the size is the stitch: a heavier yarn and a larger hook make every stitch wider, and the same counts come out bigger in the same proportions.

How much bigger is a sum. This site derives every ~ figure in its library from one model — a stitch is about 0.16 cm wide for each millimetre of hook — so the same counts on a larger hook come out larger in the same proportion, and the proportion is the hook divided by the hook the pattern was drafted for.

The last column is one real pattern: the sea turtle states ~14 cm across with the flippers out on a 4.0 mm hook, and every other row is that figure times the hook over 4.0. Two warnings come with it. The yarn column is a convention rather than a measurement — it is the range a band of that weight usually names, and your band governs. And the model is a model: it works in a stitch width derived from the hook, not from your hands, which is why the figure carries a tilde on every page of this site.

What the table cannot know is your own tension, which is the one number in crochet that nobody else can supply. The gauge calculator takes a swatch you have measured, works out what any round count comes to in centimetres on your hands, and says how far that moves a stated size — the same sum as the last column, run on your measurement instead of the model.

The same pattern, drawn

Where these numbers come from

Worth knowing before you spend an evening on one of these: the patterns here are drafted with AI help and every count is then checked by machine, round against round. Nobody has crocheted them. What is promised is the arithmetic, not the look in the hand.

How we check names the eight checks, what each one proves and the two that could not run at all.

The three guides

• Reading a stitch chartThe same round as words and as a drawing, side by side, and the standard symbols with what each one means.
• Keeping countYour round says 46 and the pattern says 48. Where the stitch went, and how to find it without unpicking the piece.
• How we checkThe eight checks a pattern passes before it is published here, what each one proves, and the two that could not run.