Why You Need to Understand How to Read a Knitting Pattern

Reading a knitting pattern can open the entire world of knitting to you. Just like learning a new language can help you meet people and understand what's going on when you go to visit a new country, learning to read a knitting pattern can help you follow the instructions that come with any project that you want to make.

Just like learning a new language, knitting has its own vocabulary and it has abbreviations for those words.

One reason that it's important to understand these abbreviations is that you can make logical decisions about what you're going to do with the knitting pattern. You can decide whether or not the pattern is right for you or if you need to make some changes.

Just like reading a recipe before you cook something, it's important to read through your knitting pattern before you start your project so that you can anticipate any problems that might come up before you get stuck. For instance, if your pattern calls for you to knit for a really, really, really long time on something really boring, you might want to know that before you go on a car trip, but if you don't understand how to read the pattern you won't be able to anticipate things like that.

Second, you'll be able to notice any typos or mistakes that happen in knitting patterns. Typos can happen quite a bit, especially because so many people can design knitting patterns nowadays. Anyone can design a knitting pattern. The good thing about that is that there are a huge number of knitting patterns out today made by all kinds of designers. Anyone can design something and just put it up on the Internet.

Unfortunately, that also means that there are more knitting patterns that have mistakes or confusing parts in them because they haven't been edited by a magazine editor or vetted at all before they have been published on the Internet. So, if you are armed with the tools to be able to read and really understand and make sense of a knitting pattern, you can just skip over any errors or notice when something's wrong, and you'll know what the designer really intended because you have experience in reading knitting patterns.

Another thing to keep in mind is it's really important to have some sort of resource or dictionary, just like when learning a new language, so that you can look up abbreviations as you go. What you can do is read through the whole pattern before you begin and, either while you're at your local knitting store or when you're at home, read through the abbreviations and make sure you understand what each one is and how to do it so that you don't get into trouble later on when you're at home. You can use knitting videos to help you understand how to do each pattern.