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You can bet I'm going to be extra hard on a book called Everything the Internet Didn't Teach You about Knitting. As someone who has spent several years teaching people to knit on the Internet, I know that you can find all this information online -- and most of it right here on this site.

Rita Weiss claims her book makes it easier to learn those things you'd learn if you were learning from a person rather than teaching yourself through a website, and provides a resource you can carry around should you need to.


If you're completely new to knitting and don't want to bother with a basic Internet search, she's right, but there are no big secrets here.

"Questions You Could Find No One to Ask"

Weiss says she wrote the book because of a friend who learned to knit from a website but was asking her "some very elementary questions" about yarn and knitting needles. She notes that people who learn on their own often don't know about different kinds of yarn, what knitting abbreviations mean, the importance of gauge and how to fix mistakes.

All of which is true. But to suggest that kind of information is hard to find on the Internet doesn't do anyone any good. It's more than a little insulting to those of us who teach online and to people who learn online, as if they aren't as skilled or knowledgeable because they learned from a screen instead of a book.

I fully admit to having a bias here. I shouldn't judge a book by its title, even when it feels like a dig. And when the cover calls it "a handy guide with all the answers" and there are glaring places where that's just not true, it's hard to resist pointing them out.

So I'm going to mention a few. Such as the fact that the list of "standard abbreviations" leaves off ssk, and there's no mention of it in the instructional section. It says M1 stands for "increase one stitch," with no indication that a particular increase might be desired.

The only increases and decreases mentioned in the book are knit in the front and back, yarn over, knit 2 together and slip, knit, pass the slipped stitch over. There's no mention of continental knitting at all. The section on ribbing only mentions k2, p2 rib and doesn't say that you need a particular number of stitches to make it come out properly.

In Which I Loosen Up, a Little

Admittedly no one book (or website, for that matter) is going to cover everything a new knitter needs to know or would like to know about knitting. That's why there are so many books and websites and You Tube videos out there. We all have our own preferred style and way of learning and it sometimes takes multiple times reading or seeing a thing before we fully understand it or have made it a part of us.

And this book is a reasonable addition to that collection. If you don't want to learn to knit from the Internet, or you want to have a straightforward, inexpensive reference to the basics of knitting tools and supplies, as well as a refresher or reference for some basic knitting moves, this book isn't so bad.

But finding this same information would not take you, as the cover copy suggests, "hours" of time searching the web.

A new knitter would, of course, need to know which questions to ask to find information online, and if you aren't sure where to begin or what you need to know beyond the mechanics of knit and purl, this book provides a good starting point.

The illustrations and instructions for the most part are clear, and you could certainly pick up the basics from this book. But it certainly doesn't truly cover "everything."

Publication date: November 2012

Publisher's website



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.