Community
Named places, not search suggestions: the online forums that are actually busy, the podcasts that have lasted, and the festivals worth travelling to.
Three places carry most of the English-language knitting conversation online. They are not interchangeable — each is good at something different.
Free to join, and the reason most knitters have an account anywhere. Every published pattern has a page listing thousands of finished versions with the yarn, needle size and modifications each knitter used — which is far more useful than the designer's photo when you are deciding whether a pattern will suit you. The forums are organised into thousands of groups by technique, designer, yarn brand and region.
Around a million subscribers, with a steady stream of finished objects, work-in-progress questions and yarn discussion. The pace is fast and the tone is casual — good for browsing, less good for getting a careful answer to a specific technical problem.
A dedicated troubleshooting subreddit, and the best free resource we know of for the 'I dropped a stitch twelve rows ago and I don't know what to do' category of problem. Post a clear photo of the actual fabric; that is what makes the difference between a useful answer and a guess.
Whichever forum you post in, the answer quality depends almost entirely on the photo. Shoot the fabric flat, in daylight, close enough that individual stitches are distinguishable, and say what you were doing when it went wrong. "Row 14 of the chart, I have one stitch too many" gets a precise answer; "help, it looks weird" gets guesses.
Knitting podcasts are a large and uneven field, and many of the ones still passed around in recommendation lists stopped publishing years ago. These four have run for years, are still releasing new episodes, and are easy to find in any podcast app or on YouTube.
Gayle and Sharlene have passed 380 episodes and still publish every two weeks — the most reliably active knitting podcast in English. Projects, yarn and what is happening in the wider knitting world, in a format much closer to knitting alongside a friend than to a produced show.
Staci Perry answers listener questions each week, one technique problem at a time. The one to subscribe to if you want the answer to "why does my sock heel look like that" rather than knitting chat — and each episode pairs with her video tutorials.
Felicia Lo of SweetGeorgia Yarns interviews knitters, spinners, dyers and shop owners. The closest current equivalent to the in-depth interview podcasts of a few years ago, with a strong dyeing and color thread running through it.
Greg Cohoon and Pam Maher, running since 2009 and well past 270 episodes. Unhurried project talk with a fair amount of fiber-festival reporting — good company for a long stretch of stockinette.
A fiber festival is the one reliable way to handle a lot of yarn before buying it, and to meet the people who made it. Dates shift year to year, so check the organiser's site before booking.
The best-known fiber festival in the US, to the point that knitters plan a garment months ahead specifically to wear there — the "Rhinebeck sweater" is a genuine subgenre.
One of the oldest and largest in the US, with a strong emphasis on the animals and the fleece side of the craft, not only the finished yarn.
The largest UK festival focused on hand knitting, with a marketplace weighted towards British indie dyers and small mills.
Held in a livestock auction mart, which gives it a distinctly rural character. Strong on British breed-specific wool.
Local groups are genuinely harder to list, because they turn over quickly and rarely have a website. Two approaches actually work. First, ask in a yarn shop — most either host a knit night or know who does, and shop staff keep better track of local groups than the internet does. Second, use Ravelry's group directory, which can be filtered by location; even a dormant local group usually has someone who will tell you where people moved to.
One fixed point in the calendar is World Wide Knit in Public Day, held annually in June. Local organisers register events publicly, which makes it one of the few reliable ways to find nearby knitters in a single search.
New to knitting? Start with the basics or look up unfamiliar terms in the knitting dictionary. Shopping for yarn? Our yarn substitution guide can help you find the right replacement if your local shop doesn't carry exactly what the pattern calls for.