14 April, 2026
Knitting patterns are dense documents, a language in itself — usually PDFs or plain text with abbreviations, nested repeats, and no sense of progression. Knitwise turns any pattern into a clean step-by-step reader. Paste the text or upload a PDF, and the app breaks it into individual steps you can navigate one at a time.
I was inspired to build this because my girlfriend has recently taken up knitting. I keep watching her read and re-read patterns on her phone, take notes every now and then, and sometimes lose them, for a while before I understood why it was frustrating. I also tried it myself. Following a traditional pattern is a lot to hold in your head.
Knitting patterns are usually documents without any defined structure - PDFs, forum posts, word docs, sometimes just photos of hand-written notes. They're dense and repetitive by design, following a pattern means flipping back and forth constantly, losing your place, re-reading the same repeat instructions for the fifteenth time. Most apps in this space are either paid subscription services bloated with social features, or bare-bones PDF viewers that do nothing to help you actually follow the steps.
I wanted to build something that read the pattern for you, and built a structure around it.
How might we turn a static document into a guided process that keeps track of where you are?
You paste a pattern or upload a PDF. The text gets sent to Claude, an AI, which reads the whole thing and converts it into structured data , a materials list, a glossary, and every step broken down into plain English. That output is what the app displays. I was inspired by the LEGO Builder app, which has a similar behaviour of selecting a set - and then breaking it down into clear steps, making it easy to follow.
Knitting terms in each instruction are highlighted inline. Tap one to see its definition, a beginner tip, when it applies, and a short example. The glossary is generated from the pattern itself, so it only surfaces terms that actually appear in your steps.
Each step has a notes panel where you can jot anything down — modifications, reminders, where you left off mid-row. Notes save automatically.
A counter is always visible in the step nav bar. Tap the right half to increment, tap the left to open the full counter screen. It persists across sessions and resets independently from your step progress.
"Repeat from * to *" and similar directions get structured so you know what to do next, without losing count in a wall of text.
Have multiple projects going on at the same time? No problem, everything runs in the browser. Pattern data, progress, notes, and row count all live in localStorage. Nothing is sent to a server except the pattern text during the initial parse.
Learnings
The parser took more iteration than the UI. Parsing unstructured human-written documents with an LLM is genuinely hard in ways that benchmark results don't capture. Abbreviations, implied repeats, inconsistent formatting, PDFs exported from web pages with hyperlink noise baked in. A lot of work went into writing and refining rules for Claude to handle all of that gracefully without hallucinating steps or losing structure.
Project is live on knitwise.xyz
Stack: Vanilla HTML, CSS, JS · Anthropic Claude API · Vercel