If you have a question for Ask CRAFT, shoot me an email at becky@craftzine.com, or drop us a note on Twitter! We’d love to answer your crafty questions on any topic: technique, projects, crafty culture, or anything else! Each week the answers are here; include your name, where you’re from, and your website or blog if you have one!

Many of you write us with problems downloading our PDF patterns. We realize this can be very frustrating, and we’re here to help!

So, you see a cool pattern and you want it for your very own. So you click the “download PDF pattern” link, but something goes wrong. We’ve heard it all, from “nothing happens,” to “the download fails,” to “I can’t find where it put the file.” Never fear. Here’s the sure-fire method for getting those pretty patterns in front of your eyeballs:

• Right-click (or control-click on a Mac if you’ve only got one button) on the link.
• Select “Save Target As…” or “Save Link As…” or “Save As…” (will depend on what browser you’re using).
• A dialog box will show up to ask you where on your computer to save the file. Pick a place, any place, and click “Save.”
• The file will download, but may or may not automatically open when complete, depending on your browser settings. If if doesn’t open by it self, go find it where you saved it to, and double click it to open it in your PDF viewer.

You’re going to make sure you have a PDF viewer installed on your computer in order to open the pattern. These days, they all come with something capable of opening PDFs, possibly Acrobat Reader (which is free if you don’t have it already).

A note on browsers: We know from our analytics software that most of you use Firefox already, but there’s still a large portion of you using something else. We highly recommend downloading (free, open source, safe, totally rad) Firefox and using it to browse Craftzine. It handles downloads gracefully, so you can click click click to your hearts content without worrying about a stalled download or failed file launch.

We hope this helps you enjoy our free pattern podcasts!

What do you do to view our patterns? And what browser/PDF viewer configuration are you using? Share with us in the comments!