I get asked a lot by fellow designers how to do use certain aspects of Adobe Illustrator to create symbols for charting, so I figured I’d shed some light on that process. I don’t anticipate covering every aspect of this topic. I’ll be breezing through the basics which will get any aspiring designer on the path to working with Illustrator, a formidable ally in the world of publishing and graphic design. I hope that by showing some of the basics, you’ll all be less apprehensive about using the program and the craft of crochet, as a whole, will be elevated by having more designers using this technology.

I’ll be working on a Mac in Adobe Illustrator CS3, so keep that in mind. The set up on a PC looks a little different and the keyboard shortcuts are different too. I’m also working in the “basic” version of the control panel. To see if you’re working the same way, go to Window –>> Workspace –>> [Basic]. This will change your current workspace to the stripped down, basic version which only shows icons in the control panel.

The Set Up

If you’re following along with me, go ahead and open up a new document in Illustrator.

File –>> New

Call it whatever you like. I’m going to stick with inches as the measurement for this. You’ll see once “inches” is selected, the “New Document Profile” changes to “Custom.” I changed the “Orientation” to a horizontal one, since the chart I’ll wind up with is more horizontal in design.

Hit COMMAND + R (or View –>> Show Rulers) to show a ruler.

Making Crochet Stitch Symbols

It would be impossible to show you how to create every crochet stitch symbol known to man, but I can show you aspects of the software that will enable you to find your own creative solutions to generating your desired symbol. Let’s start with the basics: slip stitch and chain stitch. In the next tutorial, I’ll move on to single, double, treble crochet and so on.

Chain Stitch: From the toolbar on the left, select and hold the left mouse button over the Rectangle Tool . You’ll see there’s a small, black triangle in the bottom, right corner of this tool

[Note: anytime you see one of these anywhere in CS3, that means there's a hidden drop down menu waiting to be revealed.]

Now, select the Ellipse Tool  from the menu. This is what we’ll use to make slip and chain stitches. With your pointer over the workspace, click and drag the mouse button to create the size of the chain or slip stitch you’re trying to create.

[Note: If you hold down the SHIFT button before you begin clicking and dragging your shape, it'll constrain the proportions of the shape to make it a perfect circle. This is sometimes helpful when making slip stitches for crocheted motifs where there isn't enough room for an oval-shaped slip stitch.]

But what if the oval you make it good, but not perfect? What if you want the shape to be wider or taller? Simply select the Selection Tool  at the top of the toolbar to change its shape. A bounding box is created around the perimeter of the shape which will allow you to drag it to your desired size. Just click on one of the blue squares and drag it to the size you’d like.

To move the object entirely, click, drag, and drop it anywhere in the workspace. The Selection Tool will also enable you to apply any colors or effects to the selected object. To change the color of the stitch, click on Swatches Panel  in the control panel on the right side of the screen.

To change the thickness of the oval (called the “stroke”), click on Stroke Panel   in the control panel. To expand the panel, click on the small, grey triangle on the right side.

For crochet symbols, I usually use a stroke weight of anywhere between 1.5pts to 3pts with the typical setting for me being 2pts. Once you’ve done this, you have yourself a chain stitch.

Slip Stitch: To turn it into a slip stitch, simply fill the inside of the shape in. At the bottom of the toolbar, there are two large squares overlapping one another.

The left one is the Fill Color, the right one is the Stroke Color (which you already set but this is another way to do that). Click on the Fill Color square to bring it forward (right now mine has a red slash through it meaning that there is no color selected to fill the inside of my oval). You now have it selected.

There are several ways to change the color. You can double-click on the Fill Color square which will bring up the Color Picker window. From there, you can select a specific HSB, RGB, or CMYK color or even a #web color#. Or, you can play around with the color slider and find colors on your own:

If you click on the Fill Color square once, the Color Palette panel opens up and you can select from there.

You can also click on the Swatches panel and select that way too. With Illustrator, you’ll find that there are many ways to accomplish the same task.

For a slip stitch, you’ll most likely want the stroke and fill colors to be the same. If you go back to the Fill and Stroke squares in the toolbar, you can drag and drop the Fill Color into the Stroke Color box. (This is a great timesaver). And once you do, you’ll have a slip stitch:

And there you have a slip stitch.