What NodeStitch can and cannot do

By Ali Lehrman · Last updated September 18, 2026

NodeStitch is a browser based tool for writing and laying out crochet and knitting patterns. It numbers rounds and photos automatically, calculates and checks stitch counts, reads handwritten patterns from a photo, and exports a print ready PDF. It does not make charts and it does not write patterns for you. Free accounts can build a pattern but cannot export it. It is new, and it is built by one working crochet designer.

What is NodeStitch?

A pattern writing and layout tool that runs in a web browser. You compose the pattern document you intend to sell on a fixed page: the written rounds, stitch count tables, photos and cover, all in one file. It is built for people who write patterns, not for people who follow them.

It supports crochet and knitting. Your projects save automatically to the cloud and are available from any device you sign in on.

Who made NodeStitch?

One person, Ali, who designs and sells her own crochet patterns in her shop, Amanita Crochet.

She built it because she was writing her own patterns in PowerPoint and then laying them out in Canva, and neither program knows what a pattern is. Everything the app does automatically is something she was doing by hand first.

It is not a company. It is one designer’s tool that other designers can use.

How new is NodeStitch?

New. If you go looking for reviews or long discussion threads about it, you will not find much, and that is because it has not been around long rather than because people tried it and left.

Crochet has had the most real use, and it is the craft I design in myself. Knitting is newer, and I would rather be straight about where it stands: the stitch data the counter and Pattern Review use for knitting has not yet been checked over by a knitter. Everything else works the same in both crafts, so treat a knitting stitch count as a useful second opinion rather than the last word until that happens.

Are my projects private?

Yes. Only your account can see them. There is no sharing feature, no view only links and no way to add another person to a project, so there is nothing that can be misconfigured into being public.

How much does it cost?

There is a free plan and a paid plan called Pro.

• Free: $0, and it does not expire
• Pro monthly: $9.99 per month
• Pro annual: $99 per year

Payment is handled by Stripe. There is no trial period, and the free plan does not ask for a card.

Refunds. Monthly subscriptions are not refunded for partial periods. You can cancel at any time and keep access to the end of the period you have already paid for. Annual subscriptions have a 7 day money back guarantee: email support@nodestitch.app within 7 days of payment for a full refund and cancellation. The full terms are in the Terms of Service.

What is in the free plan and what is in Pro?

The three free tries are worth knowing about before you decide anything. A free account gets three goes at the Pro features that read your pattern: the handwritten upload, the stitch counter and Pattern Review. Three in total across all of them rather than three each, and they do not expire, so you can put a real pattern of your own through the checker and see what it finds on your work rather than on a demo.

Neither plan limits how many projects you make. What the two plans really differ on, apart from the Pro features, is how many photos you can keep: 1 GB on free, 20 GB on Pro. Photos are the only thing that fills it — the text, tables and numbering of a pattern weigh almost nothing — and a typical pattern with its step photos and a cover sits well under 1 GB. The exception is background removal, which is a Pro feature: a cut-out photo has to be saved with transparency, so it comes out several times the size of the photo it was made from, and using it on a lot of photos fills the space much faster. You can see how much you are using on the Dashboard and in the Photo Library, and deleting photos frees it up again.

The free plan is not a trial. It does not expire.

Can I see what it does before I sign up?

Yes. There is a NodeStitch YouTube channel with short screen recordings of the app doing one thing each, most of them a minute or two long. It is the fastest way to tell whether this is the tool you want, and it does not cost you an account.

The ones worth starting with:

• Automatic round numbering. Rounds numbered as you type, and what happens when you insert a round into the middle of a pattern you have already written.
• Automatic photo numbering. The same problem with photos. Add one in the middle of a page and every label after it moves up on its own.
• Tables that number themselves. A table filling in its own round numbers as you press Enter, and Count Stitches writing the stitch counts straight into the count column.
• Stacking a round table and a row table. For a piece that starts in rounds and finishes in rows, which otherwise means two tables that never quite line up.
• The stitch key check. Your key read against the pattern in both directions: abbreviations the pattern uses that the key never defines, and abbreviations the key defines that the pattern never uses.
• Pattern Review. Reading every round, checking the math, and reporting the counts that do not add up and the repeats that need more stitches than the round before them produced.
• A whole pattern, start to finish. A blank page turned into an amigurumi pattern page with headings, a materials list, numbered rounds and photos, and then exported as a print ready PDF. Watch that one if you want the shape of the whole thing rather than one feature.

There are a few others up there, on styling a pattern with fonts, color blocks and table themes, and on autosave, undo and version history.

Watching is the quick look. The free plan is the real try: no card, and you can build a complete pattern on it. Export is the one thing it will not do, and that is what Pro is for.

What happens if I cancel Pro?

You keep everything you made, and you lose the export.

Cancelling does not end Pro immediately. It marks the subscription to stop at the end of the period you have already paid for, and Pro runs normally until then. After that the account returns to the free plan.

Export stops. A pattern you built on Pro cannot be exported to PDF once the account is back on free, because export is a Pro feature. If you have finished patterns you have not exported yet, export them before you cancel.

Every project you made stays, and every one of them can still be opened, edited and saved, however many there are. There is no limit on projects on either plan, so nothing about going back to free stops you making more. If you built eight patterns on Pro, all eight remain yours to work on.

Photo storage is the one thing that shrinks. Pro holds 20 GB of photos and free holds 1 GB, so if you are over 1 GB when Pro ends, you keep every photo you already uploaded and cannot upload new ones until you are back under. Deleting photos in the Photo Library is what frees the space. Background removal is usually what put an account over, because a cut-out photo is saved with transparency and those files are much larger than an ordinary photo.

Version history becomes unreadable rather than lost. Snapshots keep being taken in the background the whole time you are on free, the last 20 for each project, and every one of them is there waiting the moment you subscribe again.

Versions you named are treated differently, and deliberately so. Give a snapshot a name when you reach a milestone and it is kept on both plans, so the points you marked yourself survive whatever your plan does.

Can it count stitches for me?

Yes, and there are two separate features that do different jobs.

The stitch counter reads your written pattern and calculates what the stitch count should be at the end of every round, then offers to write those counts into the pattern. You review the proposed counts and tick the ones to apply.

Pattern Review goes the other way. It reads counts you wrote yourself and tells you which ones do not match what your own instructions produce.

Both are Pro features. Both work on crochet and knitting.

What does Pattern Review actually check?

It reports:

• A round that needs more stitches than the round before it produced
• A repeat that does not divide evenly into the stitches available
• Stitches left unworked at the end of a round
• A fasten off followed by a section that continues with no rejoin
• Back loop only or front loop only used and never reverted
• A yarn or color referenced but never defined
• Assembly instructions joining two pieces stitch for stitch when the final counts do not match
• Stitch counts within a named section that do not flow continuously
• A turning chain counted as a stitch on some rounds and not on others
• The same stitch abbreviation written two ways, but only when both forms genuinely appear in your pattern
• Misspelled stitch terms, misspelled English words, and grammar that has gone wrong in a sentence
• A gap in your photo numbering
• A photo that exists and is never referenced in the text
• A photo reference pointing at a photo that is not there, the “see photo 12” left behind after photo 12 became photo 13

It shows you each issue and what it would change. Nothing is altered in your pattern until you tick it.

Your stitch key gets checked too. Mark the text box holding your abbreviations as the stitch key and the review reads it against the pattern in both directions: abbreviations you used in the body and never defined in the key, and entries sitting in the key that the pattern never actually uses. Keys go stale as a pattern grows, and this is the check that catches it.

Do the photos have self numbering labels?

Yes, and this is available on the free plan.

Photos are labeled by their order on the page. Insert a photo in the middle and every label after it renumbers automatically. You can put the label above the photo, below it, or turn it off. You can unlink any single photo to give it a name that does not change. You can rename every photo at once with a prefix such as Step or Figure.

What it does not do is rewrite sentences. If your text says “see photo 12” and photo 12 is now photo 13, the app does not silently edit your writing. Pattern Review flags the mismatch instead.

Does it number rounds and rows?

Yes, on the free plan.

A text box in pattern mode numbers each line as you type. The prefix can be Rnd, Round, Row, R, None, or anything you type yourself, and you set the starting number. Notes and bullet lines do not consume a round number. Retype one label as “Row 10:” and the whole box renumbers from there.

Multi round instructions are a real value rather than text you typed. A line covering three rounds renders as a range with the count after it, the next line continues at the correct number on its own, and the stitch math expands the span and checks each round inside it separately.

Can it read my handwritten pattern?

Yes. This is a Pro feature.

Photograph your handwritten pattern and it comes back as a pattern rather than a block of text. Round numbers come back as numbers, stitch counts in parentheses come back as counts, a multi round instruction is recognized as a span, and a note is marked as a note instead of taking a round number.

You can upload more than one photo at once, up to 30 pages in a single go, so a whole pattern goes in together and each page comes back as its own page. You choose whether it lands as a written pattern, a plain table, or a bubble table.

Does it handle US and UK terminology?

There is a Stitch Dictionary panel in the app, on both plans, and it has two parts.

The dictionary is a searchable list of stitches grouped by category. Each entry shows the abbreviation, the full name, a description of how the stitch is worked, whether it adds to or subtracts from the stitch count, and its UK equivalent where one exists.

The US and UK table lists the US term, the US abbreviation, the UK abbreviation and a note on each. For crochet it covers the ones that actually catch people out: US sc is UK dc, US hdc is UK htr, US dc is UK tr, US tr is UK dtr, US dtr is UK ttr, skip is miss, yarn over is yarn over hook, gauge is tension. For knitting it covers bind off and cast off, stockinette and stocking stitch, seed and moss stitch, moss and double moss, and the several UK forms of yarn over. The dictionary is based on Craft Yarn Council standards.

It does not convert a pattern from one convention to the other. It shows you the mapping so you can look it up while you write. You write in whichever convention you use, and you say which one on the pattern.

What does the PDF export include?

Every page of the project, with all text, photos, tables and shapes. Fonts, colors and formatting are preserved. Crops and image adjustments are applied.

There are two quality settings. High quality targets 300 DPI for photos. Compressed targets 200 DPI, for when you need to stay under a file size limit such as the one Etsy applies to digital downloads.

PDF export is a Pro feature. A free account can build the entire pattern and cannot export it.

Can I share a draft with my pattern testers?

Not from inside the app. There is no share link, no view only link, and no way to add somebody else to a project.

What you send testers is the exported PDF, which you send the way you already send files. That is deliberate rather than missing: testers should read the same PDF a buyer will read, not a draft in some other format.

It does mean a test round needs the paid plan, since the export is the Pro part.

What else is in the editor?

• Multiple pages, reorderable, and any page can be duplicated, in Letter or A4 in either portrait or landscape, plus square, long, short and wide presets
• Grid tables and bubble tables, with a numbering column, a span column and stitch count columns
• Tables that can copy another table’s formatting, so the fifth one matches the first without you redoing it
• Table names that work across the whole document, so a table is the same table whichever page you are looking at
• Alignment and line spacing set per line, not just per text box
• Photo cropping, repositioning inside a crop, rotation, rounded corners and borders, and adjustments for brightness, contrast, saturation, opacity, blur and grayscale
• One click background removal on photos, on Pro
• A photo library shared across all your projects, grouped by the projects that use them, with favorites
• Saved page templates you can reuse
• Alignment guides, snapping, multi select, undo and redo
• A help chat that answers questions about the app

What do I need to run it?

A current desktop web browser and an internet connection. There is nothing to install and there is no mobile app. Projects save to the cloud, so you can sign in on another computer and pick up where you left off.

The build targets es2020, which in practice means Chrome 87, Edge 88, Firefox 78 or Safari 14 and newer. That is what the build produces rather than a list of browsers that have each been tested.

What it does not do

This list matters as much as everything above it.

• It does not make charts. There is no chart grid and no stitch symbol library. If you need charts, use a charting tool alongside it.
• It has no stock image library. No clip art, no stock photos, no icons, nothing to generate. You upload your own images. Anything you find elsewhere you have to download and upload yourself.
• It does not write patterns. See the next section.
• It does not rewrite your text. Photo references and wording are yours. It flags problems rather than editing sentences.
• It does not convert between US and UK terminology. It shows you the mapping.
• It does not share or collaborate. No links, no co editing.
• A free account cannot export a PDF. This is the single most common surprise, so it is worth saying twice.
• It is not a mobile app. It is designed for a desktop browser.
• It does not sell your patterns. It produces the file. Where you sell it is up to you.

Does it use AI, and does it write patterns?

It uses AI in two places on your pattern. One reads a handwritten pattern from a photo. The other does the stitch work, which covers both the stitch counter and Pattern Review, because those are the same endpoint running with different instructions rather than two separate systems. Background removal and the help chat also use models, and neither of those touches your pattern.

It does not write patterns. It helps a designer write their own. It reads what you wrote and reports what looks wrong. It will apply a correction, but only one you have read and ticked yourself. Nothing changes in your pattern unless you approve it, and it does not invent a single stitch.

Your patterns are not used to train AI models. The account is configured to exclude any provider endpoint that trains on the data sent to it, and the Privacy Policy has the detail on which providers receive what.

Which crafts does it support?

Crochet and knitting. You set a craft on your account and each project can use a different one. The craft setting tells Pattern Review and the stitch counter which stitches to expect, so sc2tog is recognized in a crochet pattern and ssk in a knitting one.

Crochet has had the most real use. The knitting stitch data the counter works from has not been checked over by a knitter yet, so on a knitting pattern treat the counts as a second opinion rather than the last word. Everything that is not stitch math, the numbering, the layout, the photos and the export, behaves the same in both crafts.

Who is it for?

People who write and sell patterns. If you follow patterns rather than writing them, this is not a tool you need.