The same rounds, twice
Here is the shell top of the sea turtle, drawn from its own counts, with the same 10 rounds as its page prints them. Nothing has been redrawn to fit: the chart is generated from the record the words come from.
- [6]in the ring
- [12]6 forks
- [18]6 forks
- [24]6 forks
- [30]6 forks
- [36]6 forks
- [42]6 forks
- [42]no forks
- [42]no forks
- [42]no forks
The key to the chart above
These patterns use three operations, so their charts need three marks. Marks run from the top of each ring and go clockwise, one per stitch, in the order you work them.
- One single crochet. The plain stitch. A ring of nothing but these is a round that holds its count.
- An increase — two stitches into one. Drawn in gold, and forked because that is what the stitch does: one stitch of the round below, two of the round above. A published symbol chart draws the same thing as two stitch symbols sharing a base.
- The magic ring. The circle at the centre. Round 1 is worked into it and it is pulled closed afterwards, so no hole is left behind the stitches.
A decrease has no mark of its own on these charts. It shows as the ring having fewer marks than the one inside it, which is the only place a decrease can be seen without a symbol: the count went down.
Why the forks are the arithmetic
Count the forks on any ring and you have that round's increase. Round 2 of the piece above has 6 forks and goes from 6 to 12; the ring after it has 6 and goes from 12 to 18. The drawing is not a decoration of the numbers, it is the same numbers placed around a circle.
It also makes the shape readable at a glance. A disc grown from a ring of six stays flat only while it gains six a round: the forks are evenly spread, one every few stitches, and the rings sit at even distances. Where the forks stop, the piece stops growing and starts going up — the last 3 rings above have no forks at all, and that is the point where a flat circle turns into a shallow dome. A ring with more forks than the ring inside it has room for is a round that will ruffle.
Where those forks fall on the ring is not decoration either. Keeping count works through the spacing, because it is what makes a missed increase findable.
The standard symbols
A chart from a magazine or a Brazilian receita uses a wider set than three, because the patterns behind it use a wider set of stitches. The notation is systematic: the taller the stitch, the taller the mark, and each step up the ladder adds one bar across the stem. Learn the ladder and an unfamiliar symbol is usually readable from its height.
| Mark | Stitch | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Chain (ch) | One loop pulled through the last. Drawn flat and on the slant because it has no height of its own. | |
| Slip stitch (sl st) | Filled, and the smallest mark on any chart. It joins or travels; it adds no height. | |
| Single crochet (sc) | A cross, sometimes drawn as a plus. This is the stitch the patterns on this site are worked in, with a foundation chain or a slip stitch to join in a few of them. | |
| Half double crochet (hdc) | A stem with a bar across the top. From here up, the mark grows with the stitch. | |
| Double crochet (dc) | The stem, the top bar, and one slash across it. Count the slashes and you have the stitch. | |
| Treble crochet (tr) | Two slashes. A double treble takes three, and so on up. | |
| Magic ring (mr) | An open circle at the centre of a round chart. Every stitch of round 1 is worked into it, and it is pulled tight afterwards. |
The names are the US ones, and the marks are the same whichever side of the Atlantic drew them — which is the quiet advantage of a chart. A symbol has no dialect, so a chart cannot be read in the wrong system the way a written pattern can. The table on how to read a crochet pattern has the two sets of names side by side.
Grid charts, and the gráfico
Not every chart is rings and symbols. A grid chart is a sheet of squares, and what a square means depends on the technique:
- Tapestry and pixel charts. One square is one stitch and its colour is the yarn colour. Read bottom to top, and alternate direction row by row when the piece is worked flat and turned.
- Filet charts. One square is a block or a space. A filled square is a solid block of stitches; an empty one is a stitch, a couple of chains and the same number of stitches skipped underneath. The picture is made of the holes.
- Mosaic charts. Squares again, but the colour is carried up from rows below rather than worked in on the row, so a square tells you which of two colours shows rather than which yarn is in your hand.
In Brazil the word gráfico covers both kinds, and for a tapete or a caminho de mesa it is how the receita reaches a maker at all — the chart is the pattern and the prose is the footnote.
This site does not generate grid charts. The 113 patterns here are worked in the round in three operations, so a ring chart is what their data can honestly produce. If a grid is what you came for, nothing on this page will give you one.
The same stitches in Portuguese and Spanish
A chart travels between languages better than a written round does, but the key beside it does not. These are the names for the three marks above.
| English | Português (Brasil) | Español |
|---|---|---|
| single crochet (sc) | ponto baixo (pb) | medio punto in Mexico and much of Latin America; punto bajo in Spain |
| increase (inc) | aumento (aum) | aumento (aum) |
| decrease (dec) | diminuição (dim) | disminución (dism) |
| magic ring (mr) | anel mágico | anillo mágico (AM) |
One of these patterns already carries a Spanish key
Gorrión (Sparrow) prints its abbreviations in Spanish, and it uses punto bajo for the stitch a maker in Mexico would expect to see written medio punto. Both name the same stitch. Nothing in the page says which country its Spanish came from, and that is a limit worth knowing rather than one worth hiding.
Where to go next
Every pattern page on this site carries the chart for each piece beside its rounds, so the quickest way to get fluent is to read one against the other on a piece you are working. Keeping count covers what to do when the two disagree, and how we check covers what stands behind the counts the chart is drawn from.
To go the other way — counts in, chart out — the chart generator draws any run of round counts with the same three marks this page has been reading, and prints the arithmetic beside it.