Amy R. Singer knits her dream

The mind behind knitty.com talks about her favorite time of the year and making her love of knitting into a full-time gig

By Anne C. Johnson
Published: October 24th, 2006 | 11:12am

"My favorite time of year is right now," declares Amy R. Singer, editor and publisher of Knitty, "it's sweater weather. It's perfect!" Now in its autumn, this has been a great year for Amy. Knitty, a knitting magazine that is available online, is celebrating its fourth year and continues to grow, "I am getting a lot of translation requests: 'how do I translate this to German? Swedish? Norwegian?' It's crazy" but Amy feels, "it's great crazy"

And, as of July 1, 2006, she officially made the quarterly magazine her full-time gig. When Amy first began Knitty, "It was a fun project and it was a great time and we loved it," by the magazine's second issue, it dawned on her that Knitty could be her dream job and now it is official.

Knitty is unique in that it is a full content magazine with downloadable patterns that are completely free. "We are lucky to be advertiser supported - 100%," she explains, "that is how come we are free and the only reason we are free." Designers loan their designs to Knitty on a first serial rights basis for readers to use under an honor system that permits one free download and the understanding that it is not to be used for commercial resale. After the issue is archived, the patterns are then returned to the designers so that they may submit the pattern for publication elsewhere. "There are lots of people who have published themselves in Knitty and have then gone on to puts those patterns in books and that's great." Such is the respect for the designers that when Knitty first began taking paid advertisements in 2003, the first dollars when straight into their pockets, "the rule was: I don't get paid unless they get paid first."

Amy, who has been knitting since her grandmother taught her at the age of six, also finished writing her third book this year. The book, entitled No Sheep for You and set to be published by Interweave Press in the spring of next year, is a pet project, so to speak. "It's about knitting without wool" because, she reveals, "I am allergic to wool." Singer's fiber of choice is silk but she has used "pretty much everything else," including cotton, linen, and hemp. No Sheep for You filled a void Singer found in the marketplace much like another project she was involved in, the co-authoring of Big Girl Knits. This book, which was the "brainchild" of Jillian Moreno, is aimed at women size 14 and up. "These are books I wished I had available to me," says Amy, "it is worth spending the time to make it happen."

In addition to innovators like herself and Moreno, Amy believes that the Internet is a huge source of inspiration for knitters worldwide. While previously knitters had to rely upon the few quarterly published print magazines for project ideas, they can know turn to blogs and online magazines such as Knitty. If anything, Amy believes, "we are spoiled for choice."

And the community of knitters only continues to connect, united by similar experiences. Why, Amy found she even had a kindred spirit in celebrity knitter, Tracey Ullman, "I don't know her, never met her, and the stuff she was saying is just like what anybody else I would sit at a 'stitch and bitch' with would say. We all like the same type of things, we all like finding new projects and techniques to learn. 'How did you do that?' 'Show me how, I want to do it' and I think if you sat down with anyone from Japan to China to New Zealand, you'd get the same kind of thing."