Some of the oldest links still pointing at small personal websites lead to knitting patterns: a washcloth, a Möbius scarf, finger puppets, a baby hat. In the late 1990s hobbyists typed up their patterns, put them on a free homepage and told the mailing lists about them. Those pages became reference points for a whole community, and the way the community communicates has changed three times since.
Mailing lists and e-mail
The first online knitting communities were e-mail lists such as KnitList, founded in 1994, with thousands of members exchanging patterns, corrections and photos as attachments. E-mail was the medium: a pattern was a text file, and errata were sent as replies. Many personal pattern pages of that era were built to stop the author from having to answer the same request by e-mail a hundred times.
Blogs and the newsletter revival
Around 2003 knitting blogs took over, followed by the online magazine Knitty, which published free patterns quarterly and drew millions of readers. Designers started to sell PDF patterns directly, and the newsletter came back as the tool that connects a designer with buyers: announcements of new patterns, test-knit calls and discount codes go out by e-mail because it reaches people who never see a social media post.
Ravelry
Ravelry, launched in 2007, turned the scattered pages into one database: patterns, yarns, projects and forums, with more than nine million registered users by the 2020s. A pattern that once lived on a single homepage is now catalogued with photos of hundreds of finished projects. Free patterns still exist in large numbers, but many designers earn a living selling PDFs through the site.
Video and after
YouTube tutorials solved the problem that a text pattern never could: showing a technique. Instagram and podcasts followed. Yet the newsletter remains the one channel a designer owns, which is why the advice that applies to any small business applies here too: build the list, send regularly, and never make readers hunt for the unsubscribe link.
This site is an independent publication on e-mail and online communication; it does not host the original pattern pages.
