Contact, corrections and site notes

Writing to the almanac

The address is [email protected]. There is no form on this site and no account to create.

Questions that are answered:

• An error or an ambiguity in an entry.
• A point in an entry that is not clear enough to follow.
• A subject you would like to see written up.

Questions that are not:

• Support for a pattern published somewhere else. Write to whoever wrote it; they know their own numbers.
• Valuations, appraisals of yarn or equipment, and identification of unlabelled yarn from a photograph.
• Advertising, sponsorship, link exchanges and paid placement of any kind.

Reporting an error

Craft instructions that are wrong cost somebody an evening and sometimes their yarn, so corrections are taken seriously. Name the entry, its date, and the line or the number that looks wrong. If it is a measurement, say what you measured and how.

Corrections are dated and added under the text of the entry rather than folded silently into it, for the reason set out in the note on how the almanac is written: an entry that changed is more useful than one pretending it never did.

Who publishes this site

The Skein Almanac is written and published by a private individual, in a personal and non-professional capacity. It is not a company, and nothing is sold through it: no catalogue, no ordering, no goods or services of any kind. It exists to be read.

There is no advertising on these pages, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links. When a product category is discussed, it is discussed by type rather than by brand, which is a deliberate editorial choice as much as a commercial one.

Written enquiries go to the address above.

Data, cookies and measurement

These pages are plain static files. The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, loads no fonts, scripts or images from other servers, and embeds nothing from social platforms. There are no forms, so there is nothing for a visitor to submit.

The hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, as every web server does. Email sent to the address above is used to answer it and for nothing else: it is not added to a mailing list, and it is not passed on.

Copyright and reuse

The text and the photographs on this site belong to their publisher. Quoting a short passage with a link back is welcome; republishing whole entries is not.

The techniques themselves belong to nobody. Casting on, turning a heel and picking up a dropped stitch have been done for centuries and no page here claims to have invented any of them. Where an entry follows a named standard, such as the eight-category yarn weight system, the standard is named in the text.

How to read the instructions safely

• Everything written here is general. Swatch with your own yarn, your own needles and your own hands before committing a project to a number.
• Fiber sensitivities are real. If wool has caused a reaction before, test a small piece against the inside of the wrist for a day before knitting a garment.
• For anything intended for a baby or a small child, sew features on rather than using plastic parts, and keep cords and long loops short.
• Blocking involves water and sometimes steam. Steam burns; keep the iron away from hands and from the fabric itself, as noted in the entry on blocking.