About Us

What this site is

Knittingtips.net exists to handle the arithmetic side of knitting — gauge, yarn quantities, substitutions, stitch distribution — so that the interesting part of a project is the knitting rather than the spreadsheet. The calculators are the core of the site; the guides and the dictionary exist to explain what the numbers mean.

Everything here is free, there is no account to create, and nothing you type into a calculator or the knitting journal leaves your browser. Knittingtips.net is published by the team behind Strikketips.no, an established Norwegian knitting site. The two sites share an editor, an editorial standard and a contact inbox; they do not share content, because Norwegian and English-speaking knitters work to different yarn standards, needle sizes and units of measurement.

How the calculators are verified

Every calculator is built as a pure function separated from its interface, and every one of those functions is covered by an automated test suite. The tests run on every change, and a change that breaks a formula fails the build before it can be published. Concretely, that means the gauge, yarn-substitution, yardage and stitch-distribution calculations are each checked against a set of worked examples — including the awkward edge cases, such as gauges that do not divide evenly and swatches measured over something other than 4 in — every single time the site is rebuilt.

Where a calculation involves a judgement rather than pure arithmetic — how much ease to allow, how far to round a stitch count — the page says so rather than presenting the output as the only right answer.

How the yarn and needle data is sourced

The specifications in our yarn pages — fiber content, yardage per skein, stated gauge, recommended needle size — are taken from each manufacturer's own product page, not from aggregators or retailer listings, which drift out of date and frequently contradict each other. Each entry links back to the manufacturer so you can check it yourself.

Needle size conversions between metric, US and UK follow the published sizing tables. Where two systems have no exact equivalent — and several sizes genuinely do not — the tables say so rather than inventing a match.

How the guides are written and maintained

Guides are written to answer a specific question rather than to cover a topic exhaustively, and we would rather have fewer, deeper pages than many shallow ones. Where a claim is not simply descriptive of how knitting works — anything about research, industry practice or health — it is either sourced with a link or it is removed.

Content is revised when something changes or when a reader tells us it is wrong, not on a fixed schedule. Articles carry a published date and, where they have been revised, a last-updated date, so you can see how current a page is rather than guessing.

When we get something wrong

Some of it will be wrong. A knitting site is full of numbers, and numbers have errors in them. If you find one, the contact form goes straight to the person who can fix it, and corrections are prioritised over everything else — a wrong number in a calculator can cost somebody a sweater's worth of yarn, which is a real cost and worth fixing quickly.

When a substantive correction is made to a page, the updated date changes with it.

How the site is funded

The site is funded by advertising, which is kept separate from the editorial content. There are no affiliate links in our yarn or needle recommendations, and no paid placements anywhere on the site — the products named are named because they are relevant examples, and we earn nothing if you buy them. Advertising is clearly marked as such, and if any commercial relationship ever affects what we recommend, it will be disclosed on the page concerned rather than buried here.

Using the website

You do not need to register an account to use our tools. Any data you enter into the knitting journal or calculators is stored only locally in your own browser, meaning you retain complete control over your own data.