About Ali Lehrman

Hi, I'm Ali. I've been crocheting since I was about 8, but I didn't start designing my own patterns until 2023. I sell them in my shop, Amanita Crochet, and I'm also on Instagram.

Why I built NodeStitch

I really underestimated how much work it would be, and what made it harder was that none of the software I tried could handle the small things. My patterns have a lot of photos, so realizing I'd forgotten one somewhere in the middle meant renumbering everything by hand. Checking my stitch counts was its own painstaking process. And anything I drafted on paper had to be retyped from scratch.

I started in PowerPoint, then moved to Canva. Neither could do the little things I needed. So I built NodeStitch.

About Amanita Crochet

When I first started crocheting as a kid, all I knew how to make were small square blankets. Well, that got old pretty quickly, and the repetition got the better of me. I stopped for years.

That was until around 2022 when I saw that my coworker had the coolest-looking crochet octopus sitting on her desk. It hadn't occurred to me until then that crochet could do that. What actually got me holding a hook again was my stepdaughter — she was about my age when I started — and I tried to get her into crocheting, but turned out it just wasn't her thing. My nickname for her is Mushroom, hence my shop name Amanita Crochet, which I named after her.

I knew when I picked up that hook again that I wanted to take a stab at an amigurumi, so I attempted to make a mini octopus, worked from a YouTube video. I knew I needed some time to practice when I realized that my octopus had nine tentacles. I was still pretty proud of him.

Why "NodeStitch"

My full-time job is in data science. Pattern design is what I do around it on evenings, weekends, and the hours that are actually mine.

A node is a single point in a network, defined by what it's connected to. Which is more or less what a stitch is. A piece of crochet is thousands of them, each one holding onto its neighbors. NodeStitch is the two halves put together.

Pattern designing during my off-time is also why the busywork of pattern-making really got to me. If this were my job, an afternoon lost to renumbering photos would just be a slow afternoon at work. As a hobby, it's an afternoon I don't get back, out of the few I had. The tedious parts don't only slow you down — they eat the part you actually want to be doing.

That's what NodeStitch is for.

What I've written

• How to check stitch counts in a crochet pattern before testers see it
• How to number photos in a crochet pattern without renumbering them by hand
• How to crochet the griddle stitch, including how to increase and decrease
• What actually goes in a crochet pattern PDF
• Crochet and knitting pattern software, compared by someone who writes patterns
• The best crochet and knitting pattern app, depending on what you mean by app
• How to find crochet and knitting pattern testers when you do not have a following
• What to send pattern testers, and what to ask them
• What NodeStitch can and cannot do
• What to use instead of Canva or PowerPoint for writing crochet and knitting patterns

Get in touch

If you have a question, a bug, or an idea for what NodeStitch should do next, I'd like to hear it. Send me a message, or write tosupport@nodestitch.app.