The Abbreviations, Plain English
Okay. You've got a practice square under your belt, so now we're going to look at an actual written pattern and figure out what it's telling you to do.
I know these things look like a foreign language at first. A bunch of letters, some commas, some asterisks, and you're supposed to just know what "sc, ch 1, sk 1 st" means. Nobody's born knowing this. You learn it the same way you learned that a green light means go — somebody told you once and then you just knew it forever.
So let's get you told.
The stitches you already know
You've made chains and single crochet already, so let's start there.
- ch = chain
- sc = single crochet
- st or sts = stitch or stitches
- sk = skip
That's it, that's the alphabet you already speak. Everything else builds on it.
The stitches coming up
You'll see these in patterns before we've even covered them in class, so I want you to recognize them even if you can't do them yet:
- hdc = half double crochet
- dc = double crochet
- tr = treble (or triple) crochet
- sl st = slip stitch
- yo = yarn over
- rep = repeat
- beg = beginning
- rnd = round (for anything worked in a circle instead of back and forth in rows)
Don't panic about the ones you don't know yet. We'll get to them. Right now I just want the letters to stop looking like static.
Reading the punctuation
This is the part nobody explains and it should be explained on day one, so here we go.
Parentheses ( ) usually group a set of instructions that repeat, or they tell you how many stitches you should have at the end of a row. Like this:
sc in each st across (12 sts)
That last bit isn't a stitch to make. It's the pattern checking your work. You should have twelve stitches when you get to the end of that row. If you count and you've got thirteen, you added one somewhere. If you've got eleven, you dropped one. This is your built-in answer key and I want you to actually use it, every row, especially at the start. It'll save you from finding out four inches later that your square's turned into a triangle.
Asterisks \* mark a chunk of instructions you're supposed to repeat. You'll see something like:
*sc in next st, ch 1, sk 1 st* rep from * across
Everything between the two asterisks is the piece that repeats. Read it once, understand what it's doing, then just repeat that motion across the row. Don't try to hold the whole row in your head. Hold the one repeat.
Commas just separate individual steps, same as in a sentence. Read them left to right, one instruction at a time. Don't read ahead. I mean it — reading three steps ahead is how you end up doing step two before step one and getting confused about why nothing lines up.
How to actually work through a line
Here's my method, and your mileage may vary, but it's worked for me for forty-some years:
- Read the whole line once through, out loud if you're home alone (or under your breath if you're not).
- Do the first instruction.
- Cover up everything except the next instruction with your finger if you have to. There's no shame in it.
- Count your stitches at the end if the pattern gives you a number.
That's the whole system. Slow, boring, and it works.
When you find a mistake
Here's the thing about patterns, and about your own work: sometimes you get five or six rows in and realize something's off. Maybe you miscounted a repeat. Maybe you skipped a "ch 1" that was supposed to be there.
You have two choices. You can leave it and hope nobody notices, or you can rip it out and fix it.
I'll tell you which one I do. I once frogged — that's the term, "frogging," rip it, rip it, get it, it's a terrible pun and I didn't invent it — an entire afghan. Not a row. Not two rows. Weeks of work, gone, because I found a mistake about six inches down and it bugged me every single time I looked at that blanket. Ronald thought I'd lost my mind, pulling out a whole afghan over one row nobody else would ever notice. I sooo did not care. I knew it was there. That was enough.
I'm not saying you have to be that stubborn about every washcloth. But I am saying: don't be afraid to pull it out. Ripping back isn't failure, it's just part of the skill, same as chaining or turning. The people who quit crochet are usually the ones who never let themselves undo anything, so every little mistake sits there getting worse and more discouraging. Fix it. It's just yarn.
A word about gauge, since patterns love to mention it
You'll see "gauge" listed at the top of most patterns, some paragraph about how many stitches per inch you're supposed to get. For a washcloth, I want you to relax about this. It genuinely does not matter. If your washcloth comes out a little bigger or smaller than the pattern says, congratulations, you have a washcloth. Save the gauge worrying for sweaters, years from now, if you ever get there.
Before next time
Grab any simple pattern — a washcloth pattern's fine — and just read through it without making a single stitch. See if the abbreviations make sense to you now. If something still looks like static, bring it Tuesday and we'll sort it out together.