Adding stitches

You can add stitches to your diagram by dragging them from the stitch rail onto the canvas, building up rounds and rows one stitch at a time. This page covers placing basic stitches, adding a stitch on top of another, and building increases and decreases.

Dragging a stitch from the rail

The stitch rail down the left edge is where stitches come from.

1. Make sure the Stitch tool is selected in the toggle above the rail.
2. Press on a stitch icon in the rail — for example Double crochet — and drag it onto the canvas.
3. Release where you want the stitch. The stitch appears as its standard crochet symbol.

Dragging is the key gesture: simply clicking a rail icon arms that stitch but does not place anything. Drag out onto the canvas and drop to add a stitch.

The rail shows your common stitches directly. For everything else — treble and taller stitches, front- and back-post stitches, textured and special stitches — select All stitches to open the full library. It has a search box and category tabs (All, Basic, Posts, Clusters, Textured, Special). You can drag a stitch straight out of the library, or pin a stitch to the rail so it is always one drag away.

Adding a stitch on top of another

Real crochet is worked into the stitches below, and the editor mirrors that: you can add a new stitch directly on top of an existing one, which links the two together.

1. Select the stitch you want to build on, making sure its top handle is part of the selection — marquee around the whole stitch, or around just its top ring.
2. Right-click (or long-press on a touch screen) the stitch to open its menu.
3. Choose Add stitch on top… to add a single stitch, or Add increase on top… to add an increase, then pick the stitch type.

If the Add … on top items are grayed out, the top handle is not in your selection — reselect and include the top ring.

Increases and decreases

An increase works two (or more) stitches out of one base; a decrease joins two (or more) stitches into one top. Both are built with a short click sequence rather than a single drag.

1. Select Increase — single crochet or Decrease — single crochet on the rail. (Use All increases & decreases to choose a different stitch type — double crochet, treble, post stitches, and so on.) The editor switches to Place mode.
2. Click the canvas to set the shared end: for an increase, the first click places the shared base; for a decrease, it places the shared top.
3. Click again for each stitch that fans out from it — two clicks for a standard 2-into-1 increase or 1-into-2 decrease.
4. Press Enter to confirm. Press Esc at any point to cancel.

Chains and rings

A chain is just another stitch on the rail — drag it out like any other, and place several in a row to make a chain of the length you need. There is also a Chain mode in the toolbar for moving and rotating a chain guide.

For work in the round, use the Guide tool (the toggle above the rail). It offers foundation shapes — a line, concentric circles, a magic ring, concentric arcs, and a Bézier curve — that you lay down first and then work stitches along or around. A magic ring is the classic center start for a round: place the ring guide, then add your first round of stitches around it. To add several evenly spaced stitches along a guide at once, right-click the guide and choose Add stitches….

Tip

Stitch arrays (line, Bézier, circle, arc) at the bottom of the rail place a whole run of evenly spaced stitches in one action — handy for a full round or a long row.