Knitting needle sizes vary from country to country. Our knitting needle conversion chart will help you decide which needle sizes to use for any pattern regardless of its origin.

Here are some handy free printable knitting tools. (You'll need Acrobat Reader or Mac Preview to open and print).

Here is a list of knitting abbreviations and instructions in common usage. Everyone seems to have a slight variation on the standard shorthand but this should cover most knitting abbreviations.

Welcome to the Tricksy Knitter library of knitting stitches.

If you have one of our patterns here are some of the stitch charts to help you knit them.

Here are a few lace knitting charts we've made using the chart maker.

Here are a few charts for different knitting stitches

Okay, everyone thinks easy means something different...

Here are a few of the basic knitting stitches.

The beginner knitter will often start with garter stitch, where every row is knit. Then we move on to stocking (stockinette) stitch, where the right side is knit and the wrong side is purled. And the next big breakthrough is combining knits and purls. If you've mastered knit and purl, all you need to learn to access an infinite number of knitted textures, is how to combine knit and purl.

When you are knitting, your yarn is in the back of the work. When you purl, it's in the front. So if you want to, for example, knit 1 stitch, purl 1 stitch, knit 1 stitch, etc, all you need to do before you work a stitch is move the yarn from back to front or front to back.

Once you have that, you can add texture, motifs, and borders to your knitting. Here are just a few useful knitting patterns that combine knit and purl stitches, with written instructions and charts.