First post here, so bear with me lol. I’m Dani or Luna and I’ve been crocheting for years. My great grandma taught me how to crochet when I was 7 and I’ve loved it since.
That being said, I’m still learning lots and I want to grow more. I want to know how to go about starting to write patterns. Is there like a formula that makes the process smooth, or will this be a brute force trial and error thing to learn how to create great patterns?
It’s nice to meet everyone and thank you in advance for your replies!
I definitely recommend keep practicing with other people’s patterns!! The more patterns you read, the more familiar you get for writing your own. You also get used to all of the lingo, abbreviations, and how to write out steps.
Thank you! I definitely want to keep practicing with other people’s patterns, but I’m just excited to get to the point where I can create my own too. Do you have a favorite designer here on Ribblr? I need to follow more people!
We share the same dream! I want to be a crochet designer too. Im making clothes from free hand and now im trying to write patterns for them too. I dont use to follow patterns, and that is something i regret a bit, because that is a way of learning how to write them. I recently learned how to calculate how much yarn needed and how to do the size grading for a pattern so i hope my pattern will be good now! I have made some post about how to do size grading, write patterns and how to calculate how much yarn on my instagram. Im happy to share what i know so far and would love to hear how it is going for you, and do this together.
I just posted a tester call to my summer top, if you want to try to follow my pattern free.
I was fortunate enough to have a mentor who had been published many times in UK magazines like Inside Crochet. Her advice in the beginning was try out patterns from a wide range of designers, including UK & US terminologies. To get a feel for how they are written. There is no universal standard format, which can be a bit daunting.
She also used to nag me for not writing down my notes when I was free-handing stuff, took me 3 years before I started to do it. Then came translating those notes into a legible format that others could understand.
In the beginning she gave me a copy of the Inside Crochet style sheet so that I could get used to writing my patterns in a particular way. Since then I have also used the style sheets for Simply Crochet and Crochet Now as both myself and my fellow shop designer have had patterns published in those magazines.
You could always reach out to designers and ask about mentoring, that’s how I began, and over the past year I have been mentoring Kaden through the process.
Myself and Kaden have found Ribblr to be fantastic for jotting down our patterns as it’s all in one place and we like the interface. In the past it’s been handwritten notes in a notebook, followed by typing up those notes in Word or Google docs and then formatting it into a pdf. Ribblr has made the design process much easier. We still use our notebooks for sketching and making colour/yarn notations but use Ribblr for the rest of it.
If Ribblr could have a notebook / sketchbook feature that folks could use this would help (I’m not a designer and perhaps Ribblr already has something like this, I have no idea)
I can also recommend looking out for a garments and grading course plus hiring a tech editor. I have commissioned @StitchReader several times in the past year and the investment is most definitely worth it.
