What sources of information (e.g. books with patterns, yarn ranking sites, how-to-guides) do you use for knitting?
What sources of information (e.g. books with patterns, yarn ranking sites, how-to-guides) do you use for knitting?
While I am asking about what knitting resources you use I might as well plug this thread asking for knitting resources for beginners.
I have a Ravelry account I rarely use. I come here from time to time. I still have a few how to knit books I got as a child. And I have a few specific tutorials (none are video-only, they are all image + text tutorials) bookmarked online that I know I'll need to refer back to sometime in the future:
- https://sheepandstitch.com/what-is-knitting-gauge/
- https://nourishandnestle.com/tension-in-knitting-too-loose-tight-or-inconsistent/
- https://www.yarnspirations.com/blogs/how-to/how-to-knit-cables
- https://sarahmaker.com/stockinette-stitch/
- https://smokeandslate.com/pages/weave-in-ends-stockinette-stitch
Finally, I keep the pattern I am working on written out in Obsidian (@[email protected] says hi), with a little note at the bottom describing the tension I am using and this: "Finished row x, need to start at row x + 1". (If I wrote 'row x' I would have no idea if I just finished it and need to start x + 1, or if I just finished x - 1 and need to start row x. That was a serious issue for me when using just a counter that ticks up. I could just technically write 'Finished row x' but I feel better both writing that and 'need to start row x + 1'.)
I’m a huge fan of Ravelry for finding patterns. Also, when I started actually using the stash function, it became a game changer. I don’t have a huge stash (I know some do) but I still wanted to work it down, so for the last couple of years, I’ve found patterns for and queued stuff for most of my stash and have slowly been making my way through it.
I use the KnitCompanion iPad app for tracking my progress on patterns, and I love it, but I also have the old non-subscription version. Not sure I would use it if I had to pay a subscription.
I know a lot of people only use free patterns, but I gotta say that paying for patterns has really upped the quality of my knitting. Not universally of course; sometimes people want you to pay for something you could easily figure out for yourself, which is rather lame. But well-written patterns are golden, and worth the extra few bucks. When there is something new in a pattern that I don’t know how to do, YouTube is an amazing resource and I’ve never not been able to find how to do something there.
Archive.org has a lot of resources for knitting. You can find patterns for all levels, and also books on all kinds of techniques. As someone who dislikes video tutorials I find the Internet Archive invaluable.
As someone who also tries to avoid video as much as I can and favors text and static images, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I knew of the Internet Archive but never bothered with its search bar beyond just pasting in the URL of the webpage I wanted to see previous versions of, or the webpage I wanted backed up.
If you don’t love video, you might also look up Tech Knitting; I googled and it looks like she(?) actually has a couple of blogs with similar names. She gets really nitty gritty about stuff and makes things clear that might otherwise seem like magic made from sticks. I think it’s where I learned how to beautifully and invisibly weave ends into the backside of stockinette, among other things. (I actually don’t hate weaving in ends with that method!)