Repeats and ranges, decoded

Last updated 15 August 2026

Pattern notation is compression. Nobody writes "sc, sc in the next stitch twice, sc, sc twice…" eighteen times; they write (sc, inc) x6. The compression is efficient but unstandardised — every designer squeezes a little differently — and misreading a repeat is the fastest way to a round that doesn't add up. Here is the notation, style by style.

One repeat, four spellings

These all mean exactly the same round:

(sc, inc) x6
[1 sc, inc] x 6
(sc, inc) 6 times
*sc, inc* rep 6 times

Read them as: the bit inside the brackets (or between the asterisks) is a unit; work that unit six times in a row. "1 sc" and "sc" are the same instruction; brackets round, square or curly carry no difference in meaning. On twelve stitches, each unit consumes two of them, so six repeats fit exactly — designers construct rounds so the repeats come out even, which is itself a useful check: if the repeat doesn't divide your stitch count, something is misread.

"Around" — the open-ended repeat

Rnd 5: sc around
Rnd 6: sc in each st around

No number: the repeat simply continues until the round is used up. The stitch count stays whatever it was — an "around" round neither grows nor shrinks unless the formula inside it contains an inc or dec, as in (4 sc, inc) around.

The genuinely ambiguous one

*2 sc, inc, rep from * 5 times

Does that mean five repeats in total, or the first pass plus five more — six in total? Designers use both readings, and nothing in the sentence settles it. The printed stitch count at the end of the round is the tiebreaker: work out which reading produces it. (When Yarn Diary parses such a line, it tries both readings and keeps the one that matches the printed count.)

Ranges: one line, many rounds

Rnds 8-12: sc around (30)
Rounds 4 to 6: (4 sc, inc) x6 …

A range means: work each of these rounds, and every one of them follows this instruction. Rnds 8–12 is five separate rounds — worth spelling out, because the classic range mistake is ticking the line once and moving on, four rounds early. If you track on paper, expand a range into one tick per round before you start. Yarn Diary does that expansion automatically: the line becomes five individually tickable rounds, and if the range contains shaping, the expected count is recomputed for each round in it.

Repeats inside repeats

Rnd 9: (sc in next 3 st, dec) x2, sc in next 8 st

Amigurumi shaping often mixes a bracketed repeat with plain stitches before or after it. Work it left to right, treating the bracket as a unit: three sc and a decrease, twice, then eight sc. The stitch count arithmetic still holds — each dec inside the bracket removes one stitch per pass, so this round loses two.

Let the notation be the computer's problem

All of this is mechanical, which is why a parser can do it: scan or paste a pattern into Yarn Diary and brackets, asterisks, "x6", "6 times", "around", spelled-out "twice", ranges and nested targets are expanded into a round list with every count verified against what the pattern printed. You crochet; the notation stays decoded.