Knitting

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Knitter’s Magazine to Cease Publication

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Knitters magazine ceases publication.A note from Benjamin Levisay, CEO of XRX, Inc., says that the 32-year-old Knitter’s magazine has ceased publication with its Winter 2016 issue.

The magazine published 125 issues, but Levisay says they have stopped producing it because of financial strain based on “the major shift in the marketplace from paid-print to free-digital content [that] required different approaches” to publishing. He says “key members of our publishing team” recently retired, allowing the company to shift focus to its fiber-related events (the company puts on the STITCHES shows), the “occasional” book and a new online experience.

Our newest “pub” will be on-line, free, and cross-craft, extending beyond knit, crochet, and other fiber and fabric crafts—creating a space big enough for all we love to do, all we love to make. We’re cycling back to our beginnings with energy, passion, and, we hope, you.

It’s unfortunate to see traditional publishers close down publications and have to shift focus, but it seems inevitable in the current environment where so much is available for free or individual patterns are so easy to purchase online.

What do you think? Did you subscribe to Knitter’s? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Comments

  1. I am not surprised. It was a vibrant and interesting magazine that published lots of innovative, fun, and wearable patterns. However it transformed over time into a one-voice trumpet. I am sad to see the demise of an outlet for designers’ work, but I do note that there hasn’t been something in Knitters I personally wanted to knit in over 8 years.

  2. I canceled my subscription about two years into Rick Mondragon’s mandate. I started buying the odd edition but have never liked it enough to subscribe again. Since then so many good resources have come available that I didn’t miss it. They needed to retool to stay relevant.

  3. I cancelled my subscription about 2 years ago. I started collecting in the 90s, but eventually found their focus changed to more “scrappy” projects. I wouldn’t make enough out of the magazines to justify buying it, and wasn’t getting inspired by the rest of the content.

    I also really enjoyed going to the Stitches events, but since they moved the venues far from me, I haven’t pursued them either.

    It is a shame that such a legacy will be gone, though. They published some great patterns in their day and solid tutorials, which are still relevant today.

  4. The magazine got really uninteresting after Mondragon’s seat at the head of the editorial table. Cancelled my subscription several years ago. Vogue Knitting got better and better and Knitters got worse and worse. Nothing in it that I remotely wanted to knit.

Have you read?

Knit Back at AI Patterns with the AIlephant

Lots of craft designers are understandably frustrated about the proliferation of AI “designed” patterns and photos of projects that have no basis in reality. People who don’t know how to tell if a project is AI are often also frustrated when they see a picture for something but there’s no pattern because it’s not real, or they buy a pattern that doesn’t actually explain how to make the thing or ends up looking totally different from the picture. 

Some designers have taken it upon themselves to try to make some of those AI patterns that we see online, often with hilarious results. 

Katherine Foster was inspired by a famous AI elephant to make what she calls “AIlephant,” which is now a free knitting pattern on Ravelry. 

Her prototype uses worsted weight yarn, but you can use whatever yarn you like to make different sizes of elephants. 

The elephant features a cable running down the trunk and a different cable pattern on the back. It’s worked in pieces that are joined and stuffed as you go. It uses German short row shaping on the body and includes written instructions as well as a chart for the cable patterns. 

Reading through the pattern, it sounds a little fiddly, which makes sense because it was designed to look like a pattern that isn’t real. But it’s doable, as evidenced by the handful of projects you can find on Ravelry. The ears on her version aren’t quite as big and round or maybe don’t sit in quite the same place as the AI version (which if you haven’t seen it there’s a photo of that on the projects page, too). But it’s a pretty honest replica of a dishonest photo, and a really cute elephant in its own right. 

If you make this one I would love to hear about it!

You can grab the free pattern on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Katherine Foster]