I think it’s a whole lot easier and efficient to have a plan to follow in order to learn crochet design. This is deductive learning. My daughter, on the other hand, is an inductive or “discovery” learner which I came to realize during the two years I spent home-schooling her.

One learning experience stands out for me. We were visiting the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. If I remember correctly, it was kite season, and the “stunt kites” that you guide with two hands instead of one were all the rage. So of course my 11 year-old wanted to fly one. I figured we would need some kind of instruction manual that would teach us how to fly them. So with kite and instruction manual in hand, we headed for the National Mall, where kite enthusiasts gather each March to fly their kites.

But it must have been taking me too long to figure out what we were supposed to do from the instruction manual, because my daughter kept pulling my arm and saying, “Come on, mom, let’s just do it!” I finally relented and said with some trepidation, “Ok, let’s fly it.” Talk about outside my comfort zone!

It took us a while to figure out how to fly the thing, and I kept saying, “Let’s see what the manual says.” But after each crash landing, she would pick the kite up and want to try it again. We did eventually get it up in the air after almost dive-bombing a kite flyer’s heads. Thankfully, he was more than willing to tell us what we were doing wrong, probably for his benefit as much as ours.

Learning Crochet Design Deductively

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been using the inductive method to figure out how to design crochet garments primarily because there’s not a whole lot of information out there that outlines the process from beginning to end.

But after a lot of trial and error, I think I have the beginnings of a road map  that you can follow so you don’t have to spend time discovering how to do it on your own. It’s not set in stone and will probably change as I learn more. But for now, following this process has helped me to successfully start designing items for myself, family, and friends.

If you want to create patterns based on your designs, there are a few additional steps you’ll need to follow and I discuss them in the section on My Design Process.

But first, let’s take a look at two preliminary things you’ll want to do before you actually begin designing.