Pattern Editor User Docs

The main idea behind the it's a hard frogg's life crochet pattern editor is for you to only write out the actual steps of your pattern and the editor taking care of annoying and care-intensive meta stuff like round or row numbers and stitch counts. This speeds up your crochet pattern design process by letting you focus 100% on your actual designs instead of formal correctness of the pattern.

What the editor does, is taking crochet patterns in a unified format that the editor understands. Based on that format the editor can validate correctness of all the stitch counts and provide you with different output terminology and multiple output formats immediately. Stop wasting your time on translating or reformatting your patterns. Write it once and get it in multiple different forms instead.

To get you up to speed quickly, how the unified format to write the patterns in the editor is as follows:

The different types of stitches that are used in crochet are represented in the form of commands. They are mostly based on the wide-spread abbreviations of stitches in US terminology, so you gonna get the hang of it in a jiffy. You can either simply type the abbreviation to use any respective stitch or use the stitches button to insert a specific stitch into your pattern. On clicking the button, you also get quick access to all currently supported stitches. The individual stitches have to be separated with a comma.

The following stitches are currently supported and you can use them by inserting the respective abbreviation or command next to them:

For the Puff and Bobble stitch you can add the number of unfinished dc/hdc directly after the command like bo3 or Puff4.

Another core building block of crochet patterns is the repetition of stitches and groups of stitches. This is represented in the editor by an asterisk * and the number of repetitions directly after an instruction. For example, repeating a single crochet stitch 6 times, you would write as sc*6. Making a stitch or group of stitches only a single time does not have to be explicitly specified, that's the default.

Alternatively, you can also type an x instead of the * or simply write the number of repetitions right before the respective stitch like 4sc. The Editor will automatically convert this to to the asterisk format, sc*4 in this example.

Groups of stitches are represented by stitches put in between parentheses. Repeating 2 single crochet stitches and an increase 3 times, you would then write as (sc*2, inc)*3.

Other than repeating individual stitches or groups of stitches within a round or row, often a certain Round or Row itself has to be repeated several times. Just think single crochet around a couple of times when making Amigurumi. This, you can indicate by a pair of brackets housing the number of repetitions at the very beginning of a line like [5] for 5 repetitions. This you can either type yourself or hit the button.

For example:
[4] sc*36
will lead to an output of
R1 - 4) 36sc for 4 rounds.

Color changes can either be specified in between rounds and rows or at anywhere between stitches. They are specified by putting the name of the color in between a pair of colons, like :black:, for example. Using the button has the same effect.

For example, inline color change:
:white:, sc*9, :black:, sc*9
will lead to an output of
R1) - change to white -, 9sc, - change to black -, 9sc (18)

and a color change in between rounds:
sc*18
:white:
sc*18
will lead to an output of
R1) 18sc (18)
- change to white -
R2) 18sc (18)

Notes are intended to provide additional information within the crochet pattern. Examples would be when to start with the stuffing or how to finish off the current part. Notes are simply done by putting the information in between quotation marks like "this is a note".

This feature let's you put stitch instructions outside of the scope of its own row/round. It will also not take such a line into consideration for checking if row/round counts add up with previous/upcoming row/rounds. Simply do that by prefixing a line in the editor with a #. Typical use case for that is starting off with a foundation chain, which is usually not counted as the first row or round. That way, using the number of chains including the turning chain here, will also not interfer with stitch count validation.

For example:
#ch*13
sc*12
inc*12
will lead to an output of
ch13
R1) 12sc (12)
R2) 12inc (24)

Crochet, and especially Amigurumi, typically consist of multiple parts that are crocheted independently from each other and only joined during assembly. As we obviously want to include all these parts in the same pattern, we need a way to tell where a new section or part begins and the consecutive index for rows / rounds is reset to 1. This can be done by simply putting an arbitrary number of consecutive hyphens (e.g. ---) in between lines (visually, like an actual separator). You can optionally add a title for your section by simply writing it next to the hyphens like ---Head.

For example, this:
MR(sc*6)
inc*6
---Body
MR(sc*6)
will be output as:
R1) MR 6sc (6)
R2) 6inc (12)

Body
R1) MR 6sc

The Output part is to take your input and display as the whole textual part of a crochet pattern including row/round index and stitch counts at the end. If stitch counts do not add up with the stitches from the previous round, the respective line will be printed in yellow.

The other big advantage of the editor besides validating the stitch counts of your patterns is that it gives you flexibility with how you want to output and distribute your patterns. The core idea is to:

"Write your Pattern once & print it in many ways"

Some of the functions to help you do just that are the following:

How your crochet pattern looks like eventually stays the same, no matter if it is printed with US, UK or any other terminology. The crochet pattern Editor lets you do just that. After writing out your pattern in the editor format, you can simply choose what terminology to print the pattern out in. Currently supported terminologies are:

• US
• UK
• DE

By ticking this box, you can opt to have the obligatory list of used stitches and abbreviations associated with them at the top of your pattern output. Since that will include and always update to all the stitches that actually occur in your pattern, you won't have to skim the pattern to assemble that list yourself.

With this option, you can control whether to output every single round as an individual line or grouping rounds that are the same (typically rounds a la 'single crochet around') into a single line.