About

StitchHow is a small set of knitting and crochet calculators, built around one idea: the arithmetic underneath a project — yarn quantity, gauge conversion, cast-on counts, stitch spacing, needle and hook sizing — deserves the same care as the pattern itself, and shouldn't be guesswork or a vague rule of thumb.

What we build

Every calculator on this site runs entirely in your browser, computes from a single shared, tested calculation library, and shows its own math rather than asking you to trust a black-box number. That's a design choice, not an accident — see our editorial policy for how we decide what counts as a citable standard versus our own calibrated work, and the methodology page for the calibration itself, worked out in full.

What we don't try to be

We're not a pattern database, a marketplace, or a social platform — Ravelry and the wider pattern-publishing world already do that well. StitchHow is deliberately narrow: the calculator layer that sits underneath a project, whatever pattern or platform you're actually using.

Who this is for

StitchHow is built for people already in the middle of a project — swatch in hand, pattern open, trying to answer one specific, computable question — rather than for browsing or discovery. If you've ever paused mid-row to wonder whether your gauge swap actually changes your stitch count enough to matter, or stared at a discontinued yarn's label trying to figure out how many replacement skeins to buy, that's the exact moment this site is built for.

How the tools stay consistent with each other

Every calculator on the site draws from one shared, tested calculation library rather than each tool having its own separately-written formula. That matters more than it might sound: it means the yarn estimate you get from the dedicated Yarn Quantity Estimator will always agree with the worked examples shown in reference articles elsewhere on the site, because both are computed by the exact same code, not two versions of "the same" formula that have quietly drifted apart over time.

A small family of focused sites

StitchHow is part of a small family of independently built, narrowly focused reference and calculator sites, including SizeDecoder for garment sizing, GetTheAmount for home-improvement material calculators, PantryMetric for kitchen unit conversion, and TyingPoint for knots.

Corrections and feedback

Spotted something that doesn't add up? The contact page reaches us directly, and a real correction is always worth more to us than a site that looks finished.