The Pattern Drafting Bench
Give it your yarn, your hook or needle, and the gauge you measured on your own swatch. It drafts a starting pattern for a hat, a blanket, a granny square blanket, a scarf, or a cowl, in crochet or knit.
Read this before you cut yarn. Everything on this page is a suggestion generated from arithmetic, not a tested pattern. Nobody has worked the result and checked how it fits.
Make a swatch in your yarn, with your hook or needle, in the stitch you plan to use, then measure it and enter those numbers. If the finished piece comes out the wrong size, the gauge is the first place to look. The sizing charts behind this page describe average bodies and average beds, so a measurement you take yourself always beats a row in a chart.
Granny squares
Each square below is drafted round by round, with a symbol chart drawn from the same stitch counts as the written instructions. Choose a square, set how many rounds you want to see, and read the chart from the center outward.
Reference charts
The tables the drafting arithmetic uses. Yarn weights, gauge ranges, and head circumferences follow the Craft Yarn Council. Hat depths and blanket dimensions do not come from a published standard, and the sources tab says where they come from instead.
Sources and method
Which standards the sizing follows
- Yarn weight categories, suggested gauge ranges, and hook and needle ranges follow the Standard Yarn Weight System from the Craft Yarn Council: craftyarncouncil.com/standards/yarn-weight-system. Knit gauge in that system is measured in stockinette over 4 inches. Crochet gauge is measured in single crochet over 4 inches, except category 0, where the published guideline uses double crochet.
- Head circumference ranges follow the Craft Yarn Council head circumference chart: craftyarncouncil.com/standards/head-circumference-chart.
- Hat depths are not part of the council standard. The values here follow the depths published in widely used designer charts, including B.Hooked and the Knit Picks hat size chart, which also gives yardage estimates by size.
- Negative ease for hats defaults to 1.5 inches. Two inches is the figure most often given for a snug adult beanie with a folded band, and smaller hats need less.
- Blanket dimensions are conventional trade sizes rather than a published standard. They are drawn from the sizes used across major yarn company pattern lines. Measure the bed or the stroller if the fit needs to be exact.
- Craft Yarn Council standards index, including size charts for babies, children, women, and men, plus hooks, needles, care symbols, and yarn label information: craftyarncouncil.com/standards. Source line requested by the council for reproduced material: Craft Yarn Council's www.YarnStandards.com.
How the numbers are calculated
- Stitch counts come from your gauge multiplied by the finished measurement, then rounded to the nearest number the stitch pattern can use. A granny square blanket rounds to whole squares instead.
- Gauge prefills take the midpoint of the council range for the yarn weight, then scale it for the stitch you chose. A double crochet fabric works up wider per stitch than single crochet, garter is shorter per row than stockinette, and ribbing pulls in. Those scaling factors are calibrated against published yarn company gauges rather than measured in a lab, so treat them as a starting point and overwrite them with your swatch.
- Hat crowns in crochet are worked top down from a ring, increasing one stitch per section per round until the crown is as wide across as the hat, then working even to depth. In knit the hat is worked bottom up and the crown is decreased over eight sections.
- Yarn estimates multiply the finished area by a yards-per-square-inch figure for the yarn weight and craft, adjusted for how much yarn the stitch consumes. Textured stitches take more yarn than they look like they should. Add a skein of margin, and buy the same dye lot.
- Rounding always favors the stitch repeat. If the pattern needs a multiple of three plus one, the count you get will be a multiple of three plus one, which can move the finished size by a fraction of an inch.
What this page does not do
It does not grade a garment with shaping, write charts for colorwork, or check that a stitch pattern looks good at your gauge. It gives you the numbers to start from and the arithmetic behind them, so you can change one and see what happens.
Printed from The Pattern Drafting Bench. Output is a suggestion, not a tested pattern; swatch first.