What Knitting Tips Monthly Actually Is
It's a monthly newsletter and digital resource that compiles practical advice for knitters at every level. The format has shifted over the years — it started as a print zine, moved to email digests, and now lives mostly as a blog archive with a small paid tier for pattern PDFs and live Q&A sessions. Most people I know who follow it do so for the technique breakdowns, not the patterns. The main site is knittingtipsmonthly.com. They have a free weekly email that covers one topic per issue — tension control, yarn substitution, reading stitch charts, that sort of thing. The monthly digest is where they go deeper. To subscribe, you enter your email and choose between free or premium. Premium runs about $5 a month and includes downloadable pattern PDFs, video demonstrations, and access to their subscriber-only discussion thread. No app. No physical mail. Just email and web. I stopped buying the premium tier after eight months. The pattern PDFs were fine but honestly just repackaged free patterns from elsewhere with minor modifications. The real value was in the technique articles, and those showed up in the free digest within a few weeks anyway.
What Makes It Worth Your Time
The content is grounded in actual garment construction problems, not decorative stitch charts. You will find articles on blocking techniques for different fiber contents, how to read a schematic versus a finished garment measurement, why your ribbing is collapsing even though your gauge is perfect, and how to calculate sleeve increase rates without a formula sheet. These are the things that come up when someone tries to knit a fitted sweater and it ends up looking like a tent. One thing that caught me off guard early on: their section on yarn weight mislabeling. Every milliner I've talked to knows this, but it bears repeating — the label on a skein is often wrong. A yarn tagged as DK might behave like fingering. Knitting Tips Monthly had a whole article on how to test this by knitting a gauge square, washing it, then measuring again after drying. The number changed by 15-20 percent in most cases I tried. That matters when you are working from a pattern that lists finished measurements rather than gauge requirements. If you skip the wash step, your sleeves will be too long or your body too tight and you won't know why until it's already done.
The Parts That Don't Work
Two honest limitations. First, the publishing schedule is inconsistent. Some months you get three detailed articles in a single issue. Other months you get one or nothing for a full six weeks. They don't announce delays publicly, so if you are expecting content on the 1st and it doesn't arrive by the 15th, assume there will be a gap and move on. Second, the advice skews toward traditional Western garment knitting. If you work in lace shawls, Fair Isle colorwork, or non-Western techniques like Norwegian knitting or Tunisian crochet, you will find the relevant articles sparse. There is occasional coverage, but it is not the focus. For those crafts, you are better off looking at specialized resources rather than relying on this as a primary source.
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How I Use It in Practice
I don't read it cover to cover. I search it. When I run into a problem — say, my stockinette is curling badly on a baby blanket and I need to figure out whether it's the yarn, the needle material, or my tension — I go to the archive and search for the symptom. The search function is basic but it works well enough if you use the right terms. "Stockinette curl" brings up a three-part series that ran two years ago, and it was still the most accurate explanation I found anywhere. For downloading their free content, you don't need an account. Just browse the blog and click on any article. PDFs require login, but the free articles are fully readable without creating one. Their social media presence is minimal. No Instagram, no Pinterest, not even a consistent YouTube channel. If you want to stay updated, email subscription is the only reliable method.
Quick Recommendation
Subscribe to the free weekly digest. Read it when you have a project stalled or when you notice something about your stitches that doesn't look right. Skip the premium tier unless you specifically need their pattern PDFs and you've verified those patterns aren't freely available elsewhere first. The archive alone is searchable and worth bookmarking for reference whenever you hit a technical wall.
