What You Need to Know About Tech Editing & Gauge As a Crochet Designer | Podcast Episode #111

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Not sure how to make your patterns available in more than one size (without making them all)?

Whether you aspire to be a professional tech editor, need to learn how to tech edit your own patterns or simply have no clue what gauge is, there is something valuable for you in this episode!

Special Guest

I’m joined by professional tech editor, Emily from Fiat Fiber Arts and we made it our personal mission to help you with gauge. She’ll help you understand what it means to tech edit a pattern (for those of you who design patterns) and understand what gauge is (for those of you who follow patterns for fun). Emily started tech editing professionally after realizing this was her passion. She is a wealth of knowledge and she doesn’t hold anything back! You might want to grab a notebook for this one – it’s a goodie!

Episode Transcript

Brittany:
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 111 of the BHooked podcast. You are in the right place if you’re looking to improve your crochet and your knit skills, and I think you’ll really enjoy the episode today.

So tell me, when was the last time you followed along with a pattern, you made the thing, and then it was a completely different size? Let’s say you were making a hat that’s supposed to be for an adult, and when it was finished, you thought, wow, this won’t even fit my kid. What went wrong?

Those are the things that we’re going to address in today’s episode, and we’ll specifically relate it to that big old G word. Gage. I’m joined by Emily, professional tech editor, and she shares such an incredible perspective about Gage, why it’s important for somebody who is following a pattern just for fun, and why it’s important for us as designers.

In addition to that, she talks a lot about tech editing, and she sort of geeks out on this a little bit because it’s her profession, it’s what she’s passionate about, and let’s be honest, she’s just really darn good at it.

So you’ll hear all about gauge as it relates to you as somebody following someone else’s pattern, gauge as it relates to you as a designer or a blogger, somebody just recording patterns and publishing them, but we’ll also talk about tech editing a little bit towards the end and why it’s something that you should consider if you are a designer.

Now there are a lot of goodies in today’s episode. You might want to grab a pen and paper and take notes if you’re not on the go. So let’s just get right to it. So Emily, hi, welcome to the show.

Emily: 2:19
Hi, thanks so much for having me

Brittany: 2:20
Well, it is my pleasure. I can’t even tell you how excited I am about this episode because so many people are hung up on gauge and pattern writing and you have the knowledge to be able to help us with both of those things. So this is going to be really fun.

Emily: 2:39
Thank you so much. I think I’m probably more excited than you. No idea.

Brittany: 2:44
I don’t know. I might have to challenge you on that one. I know this is going to help a lot of people. Before we dive into all things gauge and pattern testing and tech editing, first tell me a little bit about you and how you got into this world of tech editing and just crochet in general.

Emily: 3:01
Oh, great. Thank you. It’s… It’s kind of hard not to just expunge my whole life story with that question because it’s really kind of personal. But I am a wife and a mother of five children, and they are ages two to ten right now. And the first three were in less than three years.

And before I even got married, I always liked doing fiber stuff. But I put it off for a few years when I got married and started having babies. And it really had an effect on my emotions and my attitude and that was really apparent after the third baby and I had really bad postpartum anxiety and depression.

Once I was starting to come out of that and heal, I got back into fiber stuff big time and realized how much it fed my soul and I really needed it in my life. So I started crocheting pretty intensively right then and got online and was following designers and this was about 2011.

And that was when a lot of bloggers were really starting to get big. And one of them, Lorene Epilite from Creation Crochet. She had a call out for testers and I was like, oh, I’m excited. I’ll do it. I’ll be a tester. She had us actually submit a gauge swatch before she would accept us as a tester. We had to show her photos of a gauge swatch with a ruler on it.

And to be honest, that was the first time I ever made a gauge swatch. Yeah. But she wanted to make sure we could match her gauge. So I did that. I started testing for her for a number of years, which means she would send us the patterns before she published them. And I would reply back with typos that I found and questions about, are you really sure you’re doing it this way? Is this what you meant? Kind of questions.

And after a few years, she started to really say, Emily, you need to be a tech editor. And she would send me patterns and say, I know you’re going to find something. I don’t know what. But you always find something, so here. And before then, I didn’t even know about tech editors. I didn’t even know that that was a profession.

So I thought, well, fabulous. And it fits who I am. Because before I got married, I was following a math and science career trajectory. I’d gotten a bachelor’s in wildlife fisheries management. I’d got a master’s degree. I had worked as an environmental consultant where I did technical editing.

I actually was editing a gigantic scientific document. And so I’ve done a lot of writing and paying attention to numbers and paying attention to the really tiny little detail for quite a while. So I have a background that has actually enhanced, I think, enhanced my ability to pay attention to the minute details that a lot of people sometimes overlook.

And that has come all the way from my first plant identification classes. You know, try identifying different species of grass. You know, it gets pretty detailed. So it fits a lot of the skills that I already have. It fits my passion for crochet and stitching. It feeds my craving for reading patterns kind of thing.

I have a massive Ravelry pattern collection that I’m never going to be able to make. So it really fits to be a tech editor. And last year, I took the big leap of finally setting up a website and promoting myself and putting myself out there as a tech editor. And it’s been a fantastic year since then.

And if it wasn’t for just getting hooked on crochet and becoming a tester and getting to know some designers, I wouldn’t even be here right now. So it’s really been a fantastic experience.

Brittany: 7:18
Yeah, that’s amazing. And it shows that there really is a need for it because you’re able to do it full time, right? You’re doing this full time?

Emily: 7:25
Well, as full time as I—with five kids.

Brittany: 7:28
Right.

Emily: 7:30
You know, so I still have two of them at home. There’s a two and a half year old and one is five. And so there are constant interruptions. And so it is a balance of, you know, doing mom life and home life and trying to fit this in as much as possible because we really do need the income.

And so it’s not as full time as I would hope it could be. But it’s working, and that’s what’s just amazing. And it was actually, you know, partly your blog that helped—I mean, your blog, this podcast—that helped encourage me because last year or so, I heard Jessica Carey’s interview with you and the two of you were like, where are the tech editors? I don’t know where they are.

I’m like, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. That’s amazing. Right. And the great thing is she’s one of my clients now.

Brittany: 8:42
Really?

Emily: 8:43
Yeah. I mean, it’s just fantastic. So some of the people that have contacted me, I’ve just been floored that they got in touch with me. So it’s really been exciting.

Brittany: 8:55
Well, that’s amazing. I’m so glad that you heard that and you were like, hey, I’m right here because now I’m able to share information—your infinite wisdom—with people here on the show and maybe help other tech editors or somebody who wants to be a tech editor.

I know there’s been a few listeners who have expressed interest in that. And I think it’s a whole new world. But I feel like in this conversation, we can really go in two different directions. We can talk a lot about what it means to follow a pattern that has been tech edited, something that a lot of people face.

You might go to Red Heart’s website, get a free pattern there, see something called Gage and say, okay, what does that mean? What does that mean to me? But then there is also the designer/blogger aspect of it and how tech editing could be the thing that they need to really propel their momentum forward.

So I hope we can touch a little bit on both of those in today’s show. First, though, we’ve talked a lot about gauge on the show, and I know it’s a serious hiccup for a lot of designers, you know, myself included. It was a while before I could really wrap my mind around the whole concept and understand it fully.

But it’s really a big problem for crocheters and knitters—people who are just relaxing, trying to do this as their hobby—and then they come to something as frustrating as gauge and then it’s not a relaxing or a fun experience for them anymore.

So I’m really interested to get your perspective, your professional opinion on what gauge is exactly. Let’s talk to the true beginner right now who has maybe seen it in their pattern and they have no clue what it means—what does it mean and what does it mean to them specifically?

Emily: 10:39
Right, well, gauge is just a measurement of how tight or loose you make your stitches. And it’s put on a pattern because every designer is going to be stitching with their own personal gauge—their tension, the way that they hold their yarn and the hook and the way that they make their stitches.

So for someone just making a pattern when they see gauge, I’ll admit, most people completely bypass that part. They say, this tells me to get this kind of hook and this kind of yarn, I’m following the pattern, I made my piece.

Well, if you make your piece and it ends up being not the size you expected it to be, then that means your gauge was different from the designer’s gauge. You’re making your stitches either tighter or looser than the designer made them. And it’s not that the designer wrote the pattern wrong, it’s just that y’all—y’all, I’m from Texas—the two of you stitch at different tensions.

So if you meant to make an adult size hat and it barely fits your toddler, that’s because the gauge was different. And I’ve done exactly that thing. So that’s why gauge is on a pattern, and that’s why it’s important for it to be there so that we can make what the designer intended us to make.

Brittany:
Do you want me to keep going?

Emily:
Yeah, absolutely.

Emily: 11:56
Okay. All right. So it’s defined—it’s basically a length and width pattern measurement, a height and width measurement. It’s written down as stitches and rows or rounds that fit within a certain area.

So if you imagine that you made something that’s all single crochet, then if it says 12 stitches and five rows equals four inches. That means if you put your ruler down on the piece of fabric that you made, there should be 12 stitches from zero to four inches—you know, on your ruler.

And then you put the ruler vertically on your piece and you count how many rows are in that space. Now, I have a video on my website that gives a very detailed explanation of how to exactly count that. And when it comes to designers, they really need to be precise when they do that.

Because when we stitch, when you measure gauge—especially when you’re measuring the stitches from left to right—we have to include the space that’s between our stitches because that matters, that counts. So you’re not counting from beginning to end of a stitch. You’re counting from beginning to beginning.

Brittany: 13:41
Yeah.

Emily: 13:43
Think of a piece that you hold up and you can see the holes through them. If you counted from beginning to end of a stitch, you’re missing that last bit of space that was connected to the last stitch. And so for some designers, when I’ve said, are you measuring from beginning to beginning, they’re like, oh, no, I didn’t. So that’s where you need to go back and check it.

So that’s kind of the basics of a gauge. If someone is making something and they ended up making it too small, generally you just need to go up a hook size to make it fit better. But it can get down into more minute details like varying stitch height versus varying stitch width. How are you gonna adjust one? Like maybe you match the width but you don’t match the height. So what do you do?

Brittany: 14:37
Yeah.

Emily: 14:39
And there are different things that you could do to adjust that.

Brittany: 14:42
Yeah, I think a good next step would be to touch on what to do when something doesn’t match up. For example, you were saying there’s really two dimensions to it. You’re trying to match width and height. And… if you’re measuring and your gauge is off, in the simplest sense, what do you do at that point? How do you know that it’s off and how do you know what to do next?

Emily: 15:11
Well, first make sure that you’re measuring it accurately. And that would—you know, my video would help with that. I would love to link to that in the show notes too. I think that’ll be really helpful.

And the next thing, if it’s the stitch width, I think that would be more dependent on the hook, right? That you’re using, the hook and the yarn that you’re using. If it’s the stitch height, it’s a matter of how far you’re pulling the initial pull-up loop before you finish the stitch.

And there’s another person—I can’t remember the name—but there’s another video on YouTube that’s really fantastic and shows the difference between these. And it’s like if you’re a—she says if you’re a rider or a lifter or a… something else, I forget what the in-between one is.

But it really is when you insert your hook into the stitch, yarn over, draw up your loop—are you drawing it up just barely through the stitch, or are you drawing it up higher before you do the yarn over, finish your stitch? That’s the difference in your height.

And so everybody’s different, and if your width is correct but your height is different, you need to see, are my stitches higher or shorter, and then adjust how far you pull up that loop to try to match the designer.

And again, for different types of stitches, maybe it won’t matter that much. But the biggest place that gauge has an effect is in how much yarn you’re going to be using. And so this is where it’s a big… security and backup for the designer. If they say you only need one skein to make this project and someone at home starts making it and they run out of yarn before they’re finished, they’re gonna not be happy about that. But maybe it’s because they’re making their stitches higher than the designer made them, and so they’re using up more yarn.

So if you want to be able to make the piece with the amount of yarn that was recommended, you want to make sure that you’re getting that height accurate. And also, you know, for other functional reasons of the piece. If you don’t want it to be looser than the designer intended or, you know, basically that. Like if you make it higher, then things are going to be looser. It’s going to stretch out. So that would be a way to fix that.

I think stitch width is more based on yarn and hook. And the height is how… is really something that you would have to adjust as you’re stitching to see how high you’re pulling that loop.

Brittany: 17:51
Yeah, I love how you mentioned about the yarn requirements too. That’s an aspect of gauge that maybe you don’t think about. We were kind of primed to know that it’s important for sizing and projects where sizing matters. But yeah, in terms of the amount of yarn that you need—if you’ve ever run into a situation where you ran out of yarn, then I think you have to ask yourself, did I do a gauge swatch? And if I did, did I measure it correctly and—

Emily: 18:23
Was it accurate? And it’s really important for designers to know also that gauge is made up of stitches and rows. You have to have both of those measurements there or it’s not complete.

You couldn’t tell somebody… you need five inches of—I don’t know, I’m trying to think of something three-dimensional that you only gave two dimensions. You can’t tell them that. So that’s why you really need both.

And I’ve heard some designers maybe say like, well, if they made the thing too short, won’t they just stitch more rows for it? And I’m like, well, that may fundamentally change whatever you intended them to make.

And also, when a user is looking at a pattern, I want you to tell me everything. I want you to tell me everything I need. I don’t want to have to make any decisions. I want all the information there. And so if you’re expecting them to just… make adjustments on the fly, then to me that’s an incomplete pattern. You know, unless you literally said stitch it to this length—and that’s a completely different situation.

So gauge really has to have both of those and it plays a part in how much yarn we’re gonna need for the project. And it plays a part in just—it’s just how to match what the designer did. Everybody sees these pictures like, oh, I want to make that. Let me get all the stuff that I need. And if what they make doesn’t look like what you made, they’re not going to be happy.

Brittany: 20:18
An unhappy maker is not a return customer. Exactly.

Now, you know, I’ve heard people say that, well, gauge doesn’t matter for this pattern. And I would love to get your perspective on that.

Emily: 20:27
Right. So there are only a few things where I really allow a designer to say that in a pattern. Now, I’m not saying anybody’s absolutely right or wrong with anything, but I really like for some measure to be given.

You may think gauge doesn’t matter for something that’s really small or for something that’s really big or for something with this kind of yarn or that kind of yarn. And so it’s always going to depend on the actual pattern.

But if it’s something like, like an amigurumi or something really small—say a coaster or something—and someone’s like, well, I don’t want to make a four-inch gauge swatch for a piece that’s only two inches big. Fine. Then for that piece, you simply give the finished measurement. The finished measurement is the gauge. If they don’t match that, then they’re going to adjust.

For something like amigurumi where it’s three-dimensional, you can say—and this is on some of my clients’ patterns—that gauge isn’t necessarily important for it so long as you’re making your stitches tight enough that when you stuff it with stuffing, it’s not peeking through the holes.

But then again, they can still give an advice that for their piece, after the first four rounds, the diameter of the piece was so many inches. You know, there’s still a general idea of what the designer was doing.

So if a designer wants to say gauge doesn’t really matter, there should still be some general finished size measurement or something so that the user can at least know they’re on the right track for how they’re doing it.

For a blanket, you would think gauge matters more because if you’re off by a little, multiplied by a big blanket, that could be a big difference. You know, so that’s where how to calculate your gauge really matters.

And that’s where like a designer shouldn’t measure just one inch or two inches of their swatch. They need to measure a larger amount to get a bigger picture. Even if when you’re making your calculations later on, you break it down to the per inch or per stitch size—you still want to get your information from as big an area as possible to get all the information.

And that—that’s where it comes down to like presenting something as two and a half stitches per inch. No one—no one’s measuring half a stitch.

Brittany: 23:15
It makes me think too—you were mentioning about the yarn requirements—I know it’s really tempting to say, well, I’m making this scarf so yeah, gauge doesn’t matter, or to be a little bit more loose about it.

But, gosh, I feel like you have to argue that gauge always is important, if only for the purpose of the yarn that’s being used in the project. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much if your stitches aren’t exactly the same size for a scarf that, you know, it’s going to drape around your neck. It doesn’t really need to be a certain length or a certain width. Maybe you don’t care as a stitcher. You’re just trying to make something warm.

But… if your gauge is so much different from the designer, then you might run out of yarn. So I think that’s another important point to bring up too, is if you’re following a pattern that says gauge isn’t important, maybe you should have a backup plan as far as maybe an extra skein of yarn. Does that make sense?

Emily: 24:18
Right. And like I said, it really depends on what the pattern is and what it’s making because you’re looking at the complete picture. You’re looking at everything that’s there.

The gauge matters when you’re choosing your yarn also. And the yarn that you choose as someone making the pattern, you know, depends on what the designer told you to use. But say it just says worsted weight acrylic. Well… different brands of worsted weight acrylic—the packages are different lengths sometimes.

Each different package—you get the store brand one, you get a name brand one, you get another name brand—they may all have different amounts of yarn in that package. And if the designer just says one skein of worsted weight acrylic yarn, you could buy five different packages and have five different lengths of yarn.

So that’s where you have to kind of look at what the designer said they have and look at the packages that you have. Is my yarn matching what they used? If it does, great. Then look at the gauge and say, okay, am I going to match their gauge so that I have enough yarn for this project?

So it’s all mixed together. It’s one big recipe. You can’t just focus on one ingredient.

Brittany: 25:42
Now, here’s another question I see all the time. The stitch for the gauge. Now, most times the pattern will say the stitch that it’s worked in, but you brought up amigurumi, and that… could get people’s heads turning about, well, most amigurumi patterns are worked in single crochet in the round.

So from the perspective of a maker or a designer, how is that gauge—like let’s say they do give a stitch by row amount—do they have to do that in the round, in the specific stitch? Or can… let’s say they want to work it in the flat. They’re just doing a single crochet, a flat gauge swatch, just a standard gauge swatch. Are they going to be on the wrong track if they do something like that?

Emily: 26:30
No, I would say for things that are in the round—like a solid piece, say an Afghan square, a mandala, amigurumi, a circle, something like that—you could give the gauge. I’m okay with giving the gauge as the diameter of the piece was this measurement after this many rounds.

And for amigurumi, do that before you start moving up, you know—do it when you’re expanding that circle before you make it three-dimensional. Get what I’m saying? You know, if you’re giving the bottom of a body, you know, before you start just single crochet in each row, when you finish expanding it, take a measurement of that and say, you know, when my piece was after rows one through eight, it was this much diameter. That’s perfectly fine.

Same for mandala patterns where maybe you’re changing the type of stitch every single round. You know, there are a lot of patterns where they have multiple kinds of stitches and the gauge may just be, for single crochet, this was my gauge. And that’s giving the user just a general idea of what the designer’s tension was when they were stitching.

It’s not exactly a number that you would be able to use to calculate a size of the pattern and more complex math later on. But for the more… intricate and different and in-the-round kind of patterns, I think it’s okay to have, after this many rounds, my diameter was this.

You know, if it’s something that is made—think about like a shirt or a top and they’re starting from the bottom up and they actually made the entire waistband that goes all the way around—measure for as flat a part of that as you can.

I think the difference between crochet and knitting—for knitters, they say the gauge when something is in the round is really different from when they make a back-and-forth piece. Do you understand? Like a flat piece?

Brittany: 28:40
Yeah.

Emily: 28:40
And I think that’s because, you know, like on circular needles, there’s a lot more give between stitches if it’s in the round. I think for crochet, that might be a little different. I don’t think there’s as much give if we joined around. You know, I think you can still measure a flat enough piece to get a good gauge.

Brittany: 29:00
Yeah. And when you’re crocheting in the round, like let’s say you’re just crocheting a flat circle. If you’re using that as your gauge swatch, I mean, it’s really impossible to get an accurate measurement.

Emily: 29:13
If you wanted to write it as stitches in width and rows in height, it is more complex. Yeah, you can’t—if you’re expanding a circle, there’s no way you’re going to have a round measurement on that. That’s why a flat diameter is fine because it’s going to give information about the stitches and the height. And I think it’s an easier way to do it.

Brittany: 29:38
So that would be your recommendation for a designer. If they’re doing a circle of some sort, just give a flat diameter measure rather than make a separate gauge swatch and try to measure that for the gauge that’s indicated.

Emily: 29:54
Right, right. It’s also going to be more useful to your reader. So it’s always about making it easier for the reader also.

Brittany: 30:05
Right. I mean, we already don’t want to make gauge swatches as excited users who are just ready to dive into the project. And then you throw something at them that feels completely unrelated to the project and then it’s an even harder sell.

Right. So keeping the focus on designers a little bit now, when is the best time for them to gauge swatch? I know a lot of us—and myself included—a lot of times, if I have an idea for something, I just want to dive into the pattern and then I sort of work out all of the details later. I want to sort of prove the concept first and then I’ll go back, make another one, do the gauging and that sort of thing.

But I know that there are some designers who will measure a section of the finished project and give that as the gauge in the pattern. Is that something that is okay or do you recommend against this?

Emily: 30:58
I’ve never really seen anything written one way or another as to what is more important or something on this one. But to me, I would think that that’s perfectly fine to measure a section of your finished project—so long as you’re gonna do it again, you know?

Yeah. Like if you only make one piece and you whip out a pattern and you send it off, you haven’t even proved your own pattern. But I do think that, you know, if you have your creativity flowing and you have a yarn and you have a hook and you’re just playing around and you make something fantastic, you know, you’re going to be writing down the information.

If there’s a section of it that is a common stitch, you know, then measure that area. If you have a big enough area to measure on your piece, you know, at least four by four inches—sure, go ahead, measure it on your piece because you’re probably going to be making that again the second time you make it.

Is it the same? Measure it again. If somewhere in between there, there’s a difference, maybe make a gauge swatch at that point with your most common stitch or stitch pattern that you’re using in your piece.

So I think it’s totally fine to measure gauge off the piece that you made. It always depends on what you’re making. I’m looking at something that I’m making, and I have very short sections of a similar stitch, and then I change it, and then I change it again every few rows, so there’s never really a 4×4 inch area that’s one kind of stitch.

For this piece, I’m probably going to have to make just a single crochet swatch because single crochet is the most common stitch in my pattern, even if it’s not in a four by four section. So I’ll make a separate gauge swatch just to measure my gauge, and I can compare it back to the finished piece to make sure that it’s similar. Does that make sense?

Brittany: 33:13
It does. It does make sense. And that brings up another point, too, that I’ve heard. Well, the yarn label has the gauge listed. I can just use that. Is that a true statement? Oh, my goodness.

Emily: 33:25
Right. You know, yeah, all the gauges—that funky little square that you have that says four by four inches with this hook will get this many single crochet and this many rows, right? That’s what they expect might happen with their yarn. But again, that was based on somebody else stitching it. So it’s their suggestion.

I don’t know exactly why it’s on the label or who came up with that, but it’s a good suggestion for them to have if you were on the fly trying to do some math in the store to figure out how much yarn you need. Now, you, me, average crochet-aholic is probably just going to grab five skeins of yarn and drop them in their cart and check out. But I don’t know how much of us are doing all that math in the store.

But yeah, there is information on the label, but a lot of people even recommend, hey, for this kind of yarn, I always go up a hook size or two. So it’s like, why is there even a hook size listed on the label?

Brittany: 34:37
And I feel like you can… you can sort of learn your own ways, right? You were saying that gauge is really just your specific tension and we’re all a little bit unique.

I know for me, I recognize that I crochet very tightly, usually a lot tighter than the average person. So I just automatically know that I’m probably going to need to go up a hook size. And that’s just something I’ve learned through trial and error.

I feel like you can… start to learn your ways and use that to help you save time and that sort of thing too. Would you agree, or do you feel like you really just have to do a gauge swatch every single time?

Emily: 35:18
Oh no, I absolutely agree. If I meet a crocheter that says, “Oh, I gauge swatch before every single thing that I make,” man alive—I don’t know, I may give her a hundred bucks. You know, I mean, I don’t know anybody that really does that.

But you know, if you consistently are making things according to the pattern, according to the yarn and the hook that the designer recommended, and you’re always getting it smaller, then hey, maybe that’s a clue that you’re stitching a lot tighter than most designers.

You know, if you’re making a bunch of things and they always end up being way bigger than what you thought it was, that’s a sign that your tension is a bit looser than everybody else. It’s not that anybody was doing it right or wrong. It’s just how you’re stitching.

Our own tension may change over time. If I’m doing amigurumi pieces, making toys for my kids, I’m gonna get used to holding that stuff really, really tight. If I move from that to doing a hat or some other kind of piece where I don’t need to have that stitch in my tension so tight, it’s gonna take me a while to loosen back up to try to match the gauge of that pattern.

So I see it in myself too. Or maybe you’re used to using really big, super bulky yarn where you don’t have to hold onto it very tightly. You made a bunch of big loose pieces and then you switch over to amigurumi and you’re like, why is this falling all over the place? Well, it’s because you’re just not used to holding it a little bit tighter.

Brittany: 36:53
Yeah, that’s a really good point too. I think that’s something that you might not even think about. If you’re used to working one type of project and you make a transition to another, there’s not really a learning curve there, but just a breaking-in process.

The other thing I want to touch on—and I know this is going to get extremely mathematical—but if we can keep it just in the basics, or even if you have resources available, a couple of questions that come up.

As designers, one is about grading. So if you’re working with different sizes and then ordering the yarn or estimating the amount of yarn that you need for those other sizes without actually having to make them or have somebody—have a pattern tester make them for you to just verify what you have figured out. Do you have any insight on those topics? Right.

Emily: 37:47
It is a lot of math. That’s, that’s the first thing. Um, so when a designer makes their original piece, they need to keep track of, you know, everything that they’re doing. First of all, like all the stitches, your entire pattern, they need to keep track of how much yarn they used.

And if you use a partial skein, you’re going to get down to the level of weighing your piece and looking at the yarn labels and/or weighing how much yarn was left over in the final skein that I didn’t finish using. And so there is a lot of very technical calculations that need to be made just to determine exactly how much yardage was used in your piece.

Once you have that information, then the next step of the process, as far as grading goes, is knowing what size you want the other sizes to be. That means you’re getting into questions of ease. Are we making a tight-fitting piece? Are we making a loose-fitting piece? And then what measurements do I want that piece to have for the sizes as you go up?

The Craft Yarn Council has a lot of great standardized measurements for people’s sizes—for head size, foot size, bust, waist, hips. I mean, they’ve got a load of different measurements on there, so it all depends on what you’re making and what parts are going to be affected as the size increases.

All of this also depends on what stitch you’re using and what pattern you’re using. Like if you have a stitch pattern or if you’re just making a solid double crochet piece. So there’s a lot more intricacies that I can’t get into right now because it would just go on forever.

But if someone’s going to grade, it comes back to figuring out their gauge. Once you know how many stitches are in an inch and you want to increase the size by two inches, then you multiply that by your gauge and you have your stitches. And you can do that in the opposite direction too.

I like to calculate for gauge not just stitches per inch but inches per stitch—and the same with the rows—because you’re going to use those two different numbers in different ways. And so when you’re making all these calculations, it all comes back to eighth-grade algebra.

You have to make sure you’ve got your units in the right place. So it’s not something that’s going to be super fast. Get your pencil and paper out, write it down, make sure you’re canceling the units in the right direction, and you’ll be able to do it.

Once you have the measurements for how big your larger pieces are going to be, it’s a lot more math then to calculate how much yarn those additional pieces are going to need.

Kind of an easy way, if you want to just softball the situation, you can kind of look at it as a percentage—like how much percentage increase was there from size small to medium or small to large—and then just multiply your yardage for the small by that.

You can get all the way down to a very detailed “how many yards are used per stitch in this pattern” and calculate exactly how many stitches are in size small and how many stitches are in size large or 2X or whatever size you’re doing and then do the math for that. So it kind of depends on how precise you want to try to be when you’re putting that information in your pattern.

Brittany: 41:54
That makes sense. For somebody who is a designer who’s sort of waffling on the idea of hiring a tech editor or having somebody work with them, can you explain a little bit about what that relationship looks like, maybe how that conversation even starts?

Emily: 42:13
Sure. For me, start with visiting my website, and that’s fiatfiberarts.com—F-I-A-T fiberarts.com—and click on my testimonials tab. And from there, you can see what other designers have had to say after working with me. So you’ll get, you know, that’s like having a conversation with them—what was it like working with Emily?

Shoot me an email and tell me what you’re thinking, what you wanna work on. And then we just start with one pattern. My fees are $25 an hour per pattern, with a one-hour minimum per pattern. I also have a bulk tech edit option where a designer can prepay $35 for 60 minutes of my time, and I will keep track of a time sheet for your pattern.

If your pattern only takes 20 minutes to edit, then you still have 40 minutes left over for the next pattern. So that could be a time-saving opportunity for designers who have short patterns—mostly accessory-type patterns—and they’re very efficient and experienced in writing already.

I will say that if a designer is thinking, “It’s not worth it, I don’t need it”—the thing about editing is that no one can edit their own piece really well because your brain is automatically going to fill in the gaps for what you expected to say.

So everybody’s said something, and said the opposite of what they meant to say. You said, “The sky is green and the grass is blue,” and someone said, “What?” And you’re like, “What did I say?” I do this all the time.

Well, it’s in your writing also, in a different way. If you meant to write “10 double crochet,” but there’s a typo right there—you meant to write it, so you’re probably going to see it that way. Someone else is going to catch some of those.

I edit in English to check basic English grammatical typos that may be in your pattern. I edit in crochet language to make sure that your punctuation, your abbreviations, your coding, your phrasing is more in line with industrial standards that we have in the crochet community.

Primarily, I’m following the Craft Yarn Council’s advice on that one and other generally accepted ways of writing crochet. I’m not trying to manipulate your voice as a designer, so that’s another challenge on my part—but I want you to be able to express your ideas in a way that the reader can easily understand what you’re trying to say.

Also, if you write something and you say, “Stitch in the next double crochet,” but the next stitch I’m at is a single crochet, then what happened? So if you’re telling me to do it in a certain way, I want it to match up to what you already told me to stitch. And so that’s another thing that a tech editor is doing.

And the last thing that I’m editing is the math. I’m making sure that the stitches that you told me to do are matching the stitch count that’s there—and that the stitches are possible to make based on the previous row that you gave.

Again, that’s not saying anything’s right or wrong—it’s just that if I see something that doesn’t calculate the same, I’m going to point it out to you. Because if a stitch count is off, there’s like three different ways that that could be wrong. And I don’t know which one it is, but I can point out to you, “My math doesn’t match your math. What’s going on here?”

So I edit the pattern and send it back to the designer, and the designer can take or leave that advice as they wish. And if a designer’s thinking, “I still just don’t know if that’s worth it—$25, $35, that’s a lot of money for a $2 pattern.” Well…

Figure it out. How many patterns would you need to sell to make up that difference? And how many customers do you want to attract to your patterns? And how many customers do you want to maintain?

Because a more professional pattern is going to attract more readers. Someone’s going to read that pattern, they’re going to understand what you said, they’re going to make a beautiful piece, they’re going to share it with their friends.

If you have a pattern that has basic typos or crochet mistakes or math mistakes, or is just worded so differently from other patterns that the reader can’t really understand it, they’re not going to read it. They’re going to dismiss you as a competent designer. And that’s where you could be losing customers.

And I feel really bad for some designers when that happens. But I’ve talked to other crocheters and they’ll tell me exactly that—they’re like, “Oh forget it, I’m not even going to read that pattern if they don’t know what they’re doing.”

You know, because we’re talking about people that have been reading crochet patterns—some of them for 40, 50 years. I think tech editing can bring a level of professionalism to your patterns and security and confidence and knowledge that you’re putting out the best possible item.

Brittany: 48:15
Yeah, that’s a great reminder, too, that, like you said, you can’t edit your own stuff. Your mind fills in those gaps. And that’s not a fun feeling. It’s not a good feeling when one of your readers approaches you and says, “Hey, I think you made a mistake.” It kind of just makes you feel bad.

Emily: 48:34
Right. And I feel bad having to point those things out, you know? But I have books on my shelf that I’ve found mistakes in. I’ve gotten magazines where I’ve seen some mistakes, and I’ve contacted the magazine.

I’ve actually developed some relationships with designers because I contacted the designer first and said, “I’m seeing this in your pattern in this magazine. Was this accurate?” And one of them came back and was like, “No, that’s not right.” You know, what did they do? Maybe the magazine just printed the wrong version of whatever pattern they sent in.

But it happens. And I make the same mistakes too. I’ve written up blog posts and gone back and looked at them a day or two or a week later, and I had some autocorrect typo words. And I’m like, “That is not what I meant to say.” So it happens to everybody.

But if you’re trying to present yourself as a professional crochet designer, or someone that at least knows what she—or he—is doing, then yeah, it’s hard to have those errors in there. I mean, we’re all human though, and I have made mistakes.

It’s rare, but it’s happened. And it happened with only one designer really so far. I just felt terrible for about a month after this because she had three patterns. They were each raglan sweaters. It was three garments that I had to do at once, and she released them all at almost the same time in different crochet alongs.

And then it seemed within a week, each one had something that was a little bit off and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” You know, it just felt like, I’m wrong. I’m wrong. I’m wrong. And for a tech editor, that’s a big deal because it’s like we’re being paid to be perfect.

And so I don’t want to say, “Oh, I’m going to make a mistake on every pattern.” No. I want people to hire me because I think that I’m good at what I do.

But if someone’s thinking, “Well, I want to be a tech editor. But what if I do make those mistakes? What if I do naturally miss something? Or maybe I don’t understand something about that pattern?” You’re human. The designers are human. They should understand that.

Another big thing I want to say is, if a designer is thinking, “I don’t really need a tech editor. I know what I’m doing. I can edit my own patterns and I’m perfectly fine with that.” Last year, I edited 78 patterns from 26 different designers. Only one of those had zero errors.

Brittany: 52:12
Right, right. And that’s definitely fuel for thought as we sit and think about what we’ve learned today, what we’ve heard, and considering the possibility of hiring a tech editor.

As we wrap up, though, I want to give people a chance to connect with you. I know you have a ton of resources online on your website, as well as your services as a tech editor. So where’s the best place for someone to connect with you after they’ve listened to the show today?

Emily: 52:39
The best place is visit my website, fiatfiberarts.com. I have a contact page on there. I have lots of information that covers under the “How to Hire Emily” tab. There’s information about my fees, about what I review in your pattern as a tech editor.

There’s information about the bulk tech editing—again, if you’re confused, if that sounded totally confusing to you. So start with my website. I’m also active on Instagram at Fiat Fiber Arts. And I have a Facebook page as well.

But I’d say just send me an email from my website, find my email address and send me a message. Or find me on Instagram and send me a message. I’ve even done personal consultation with a designer to go over gauge for her specific pattern and talk about what she needed to calculate, and we were doing it through the video message on Instagram.

You can contact me a number of different ways, but I would start with visiting my website, scroll through there, and search some of the tech editing blog posts that I have—some of the how-to-write crochet posts—because I have different posts on stitch counts, gauge, general typos. I have a series of blog posts called Tips from a Tech Editor that are just… it’s usually when I see a lot of common things happening in patterns, I’ll think, “Oh, I gotta write a blog post for this,” because if a designer just really doesn’t even know where to begin when it comes to asterisks, parentheses, brackets, repeats, how to write it correctly…

Brittany: 54:20
Wonderful. I will have all of that linked in the show notes because I know that there’s a ton of value there, and I want to encourage people to check that out.

But for now, Emily, thank you so much. This has been such an insightful conversation. I’m so glad that we were able to chat today.

Emily: 54:36
Thank you so much. Me too.

Brittany: 54:39
Alright, so is your head spinning a little bit? I know mine was. Emily just knocked my socks off—taught me even more about gauge and tech editing, opened up my eyes to things that I hadn’t even thought of before.

Now, you heard that Emily has some free resources available on her website about gauge, about tech editing, about tension, and I highly suggest you take advantage of some of those resources if gauge or editing patterns is something that you’re currently struggling with.

I will have all of that linked in the show notes page, and you can find that at bhooked.com/111. Quick and easy.

Now for those of you who are designers who are just not quite ready to hire a tech editor—I get that. Well, she has a free designer’s workbook available on her website, and when you sign up to her email list, she’ll send you a set of worksheets that’ll help you on your pattern publishing journey.

It’s sort of like that first step. If you’re just getting into pattern writing and publishing your own patterns and you just can’t hire a tech editor right now, this is probably the resource that I would go to first just to wrap your mind around what’s needed and what’s expected when you publish patterns online or anywhere else for that matter.

Now I know that’s a lot for you to think about today, so we’ll wrap it up there for this week. And next week, you’ll hear from a repeat guest, Melissa from Woods and Wool, and she’s going to share her story about how her side hustle met her full-time job and how she juggles the two of those.

It’s a real good one. You won’t want to miss that, especially if you’re trying to make a side hustle business and still work full time. So stay tuned for that. It’ll happen next week. Same time, same place. I’ll see you there. Bye bye.