If you love to crochet and you are looking for a way to make money online, you should consider the idea of designing your own crochet patterns. While many people sell their crochet work online, not everyone can design their own patterns, which makes the competition less stiff. If you’ve got an eye for designing and often find yourself writing up your own patterns for personal use, consider the idea of selling them as a way to make money off of crochet. If you’d like to know more about what it takes to sell your patterns online, continue reading. You’ll get advice on how to figure out if you’ve got what it takes, and if you do, you’ll be able to get advice on the next step.
Find Out What it Takes to Design Crochet Patterns
Do you often find yourself searching out free crochet patterns to try just so you can make changes and make the design your own? Or do you see someone wearing a crochet hat and look at it more closely to figure out the stitch pattern that was used? If so, you might have what it takes to design your own crochet patterns. However, it’s not as simple as just taking an existing pattern and making changes to it. In order to truly design your own patterns, you must document every step from your first chain to the very last row. This means that you cannot take someone else’s basic beanie pattern, add some instructions for earflaps, and then claim it as your own pattern. Instead, you’ll need to figure out your own way to make a fitted beanie in addition to making the earflaps.
If that doesn’t sound daunting to you, you can try to start coming up with your own simple designs now and branching off from those as you get more confident.
How to Design Crochet Patterns
If you think you’ve got an eye for design and want to try making your own patterns to sell online, or even just for your own keeping, there are a few steps you should follow to make sure you do it right.
The first step to designing your own crochet pattern is to come up with an idea. Whether you want to write out the pattern for a purse, a blanket, slippers, or even a hat, it must first start with a solid idea. Once you have the idea down, you can start experimenting with stitches to achieve the look you are going for.
As you experiment, take lots of notes. Some important things to write down include:
• Yarn weight
• Yarn brand
• Hook size
• Gauge
• Yarn colors
• Special stitches
• Sizing instructions
Once it comes to the time of actually writing down your pattern, you’ll be happy you have these notes available.
With any new design, it’s best to test it out several times. I usually begin writing my pattern with the first draft, but I tweak it several times before I’m happy with it. Often times, I can make the same project three or four times before I’m happy with the end results in my pattern. Now, once you’ve tested your design several times, your basic pattern is complete, and many designers stop at this point. However, if you are doing this with the goal of selling your crochet patterns online to the public, you’ll want to take this a step further.
In the same way that a novelist needs a proofreader, a designer of any kind needs a tester. This is someone that takes your pattern draft and picks it apart. They make the item based solely on your instructions and take their own notes on the pattern. Then, they get back to you with their notes. Sometimes your pattern is perfect and your testers don’t have anything to suggest, but that is very rare. Between typos to wrong stitch counts, there is a lot that can go wrong with a pattern, and while you may know what you meant, you want to make sure that the people buying your pattern can recreate it as easily as you can. So, be sure to fix any problems that your tester comes up with before you release it to the public.
Once you’ve followed these steps, you can find a website to list your patterns on, and you’ve officially become a crochet designer!
Creating your own crochet designs can be a very rewarding hobby to have. In addition, if you’re looking for a way to make money online, this is a great way to accomplish that goal. Since you don’t have to recreate the pattern every time someone buys it, you can just sell it over and over again with very little work once the pattern is published. In fact, if you’re selling digital copies, you will have virtually no material costs at all! Designing crochet patterns is a great way to make money with crochet, so if you have what it takes, try designing your own pattern today!
