In order to crochet, chances are you’re looking for patterns to follow. Some of us may be naturals at free-handing things, but I think most of us prefer to have a pattern to follow. I know I sure do! The question becomes: where do I find patterns? There are tons of places to look that it can become overwhelming. I’ve put together a post with 4 of the best websites to find crochet patterns.
Hobbii
Hobbii is a Denmark-based business that sells a lot of different yarn. They have built a great little community around their brand. In addition to selling, they do weekly Bingo games and live shopping events. They also have a huge collection of patterns on their website. They do sell patterns, but it is easy to filter out the ones that cost money and only show the free ones. I find their patterns are good for beginners who may not be familiar with written patterns because they tend to include a lot of pictures to demonstrate what they’re instructing you to do. They frequently add new patterns as well, so it’s worth checking back often!
Ravelry
If you’ve been in the crochet community for more than a couple of days, you probably have already heard of Ravelry. It is an incredibly popular website for sharing patterns. Once again, Ravelry offers both free and paid patterns but it is easy to show just the free ones if you’re not looking to pay. Currently, they have over 150,000 free crochet patterns. So you can probably find just about anything you are looking for! Something I really like about Ravelry is that if a pattern you’ve downloaded gets updated by the designer, they will send you an email to let you know. The one thing I don’t like about Ravelry is the site design. I feel like the design is outdated and I found it a bit difficult to use at first. However, considering how many patterns they have, this is something that is easily worth looking past.
Ribblr
Ribblr is a website that I feel has been gaining a lot of popularity recently. Like the previous two, Ribblr again offers both free and paid patterns but if you sort patterns by price (low to high), that will give you easy access to the free patterns. There are a couple things I really like about Ribblr. First, it’s very easy to follow specific designers if you find someone whose patterns you really like. (I believe you can do this on Ravelry as well by adding designers to your “favorites.”)
Secondly, Ribblr also has an app that you can download on your phone or tablet that makes it really simple to use the patterns you’ve saved. As you go along, you can cross out rows/rounds as you finish them so you don’t lose your place. For some patterns, if there is one row that is repeated, you can expand it so that the instruction is actually repeated for each row, making it even easier to keep track of where you are. There are also some other features that I haven’t used much, like adding notes for your projects.
YouTube
This one feels like I’m cheating a little bit, though I’m not really sure why. YouTube was pretty exclusively where I found free patterns when I first started crocheting. Even the best written patterns can be incredibly confusing to newbies. Videos are often much easier to follow along if you’re still learning. Even now that I’m a more experienced crocheter, I use YouTube often. There is a huge variety of patterns that you can find on there. Not to mention, you’ll find a lot of channels about crocheting in general. It may seem obvious that you can find crochet patterns here because YouTube has just about everything but sometimes those most obvious things are the ones we overlook!
These are the 4 best websites to use to find free crochet patterns, at least in my opinion. There are tons more out there, I’m sure! I know I get a lot of free patterns from other crochet blogs, though there were too many to include here. What websites do you use to get free patterns?