This page documents exactly how chordgrove.com's pattern library is built, so anyone can check our work.
Source
All patterns come from freevintageknitting.com, a public-domain archive of vintage knitting-yarn-manufacturer pattern leaflets. Its homepage states: “All of the free knitting patterns that appear on this website have passed into the public domain… you are free to do whatever you would like to do with them! Copy them, share them, make finished items from them and sell them.” We re-verified this live on 2026-07-25 (HTTP 200, no contradicting license statement found on any pattern page sampled).
Pipeline
The source's own sitemap.xml was crawled once (shared with a sister site, yarn-library / knitgrove.com, which also draws from the same archive) on 2026-07-25: 1,673 candidate pattern URLs fetched, 1,456 parsed cleanly into title / attribution / source category / full body instructions. yarn-library selected 540 of those records first; we excluded every one of those 540 URLs and drew our own selection only from the remaining 916, so the two sites never show the same pattern.
Of those 916, we classified each record onto Chord Grove's own five real garment-type categories (sweaters, cardigans, pullovers, vests, tops) using a keyword match against the record's title and the source's own stated category label — a disclosed judgment call, not a guess about the pattern's content: "cardigan" in the title/category maps to Cardigans; "vest" / "waistcoat" / "sleeveless" maps to Vests; "jacket" / "shrug" also maps to Cardigans (closest analogous open-front knitwear bucket); "blouse" / "shell" / "top" / "tee" / "tunic" / "bodice" maps to Tops; "pullover" / "jumper" maps to Pullovers; a bare "sweater" maps to Sweaters. Records outside the garment/sweater family (hats, scarves, socks, mittens, shawls, blankets, afghans, baby items, dolls, and so on) were excluded, not force-fit into a garment bucket — this site's real architecture only has category pages for the five garment types above.
That classification yielded 397 real, distinct garment patterns — more than the 330 fabricated pages previously on this site, which is an honest byproduct of a correctly-scoped classification pass over real data, not padding.
- Cardigans: 112 patterns
- Pullovers: 86 patterns
- Sweaters: 88 patterns
- Tops: 39 patterns
- Vests: 72 patterns
Fields shown
Title, our garment-category assignment (see above), the source's own stated category label, the source-stated pattern-book/leaflet attribution (linked to the source's own patternbook page where available), the full original materials-and-instructions text reproduced verbatim (including original vintage sizing/units/phrasing, disclosed as such), and a direct link to the exact source page crawled.
Fields withheld
We do not show an individual "designer" name, needle size, gauge, skill level, yarn weight, construction-method tag, or a modern plus-size/fit bucket as a separate structured field. These do not exist in the source as consistent, verifiable structured data — they appear, when present at all, only as free text inside the original instructions (e.g. "1 Pr. Standard No. 4 Needles"), in whatever units and phrasing the original leaflet used, not as a clean tag we could show without guessing or inventing structure the source doesn't have. This mirrors the same field-dropping decision made for yarn-library / knitgrove.com, built from the same source in this same wave, for the same reason.
Data date and refresh cadence
Data as of 2026-07-25. This is a one-time build from a one-time archival crawl; there is no automated recurring refresh. A future refresh would re-crawl freevintageknitting.com's sitemap and re-run this same classification.
Corrections
If you find an error — a mis-filed category, a broken source link, or anything else — please tell us at hello@chordgrove.com or via About.