PURL Magazine announcement and Kickstarter

Jacey Boggs Faulkner (founder and director of PLY and WEFT Magazines) and Karen Robinson (editor in chief of PLY Magazine) are starting a quarterly print knitting magazine! We're taking all we’ve learned from a dozen years of creating PLY Magazine and recently starting and running WEFT Magazine to build a brand new print and digital magazine for knitters! Because knitters deserve their own staggeringly beautiful and stunningly smart magazine.

Our plan for PURL is to make it just as comprehensive, diverse, and filled with knowledge and learning as PLY and WEFT (see below for examples of PLY and WEFT).  PURL will not be a magazine filled with knitting patterns – there are already so many places to find stunning projects created by wonderful designers to put on your needles. PURL will focus on the how and why, on expanding, experimenting, edifying. Of course, PURL will include a few patterns, but those will be there to support the articles that explore technique, yarn, stitches, and skills. 

We want PURL to be a primary source for knitting knowledge, techniques, experiments, and opinions and promise it will:

• support, reflect, inspire, and respond to the worldwide knitting community
• provide in-depth material for the intermediate to more advanced knitter
• inspire new knitters
• question and experiment with things we know and things we think we know
• celebrate the diversity of knitting and knitters
• give a voice to knitters everywhere
• celebrate and elevate knitters across the entire spectrum of color, ability, gender, and queerness
• embrace and present the function and the art
• record the rich history, report on the vibrant present, and inspire the hopeful future of knitting by creating a themed, archive-worthy magazine
• support indie businesses and craftspeople via affordable advertising, fair compensation, and return of intellectual property

We love to read about knitting.  

In fact, we read everything we can about the craft, the theory behind it, and the people who love it – but there aren't many print knitting magazines around anymore and we aim to change that! Knitters deserve a gorgeous, smart, magazine that inspires, informs, and questions! We seek to help round out the knitting world by adding our robust magazine full of in-depth articles. 

What will be different between PURL and other (past and present) knitting magazine? We aim to be so much more than a collection of patterns and projects! We want to take the model we've built for PLY and WEFT and really dig into knitting. Let's look at how and why, best choices, and great practices (see below for a couple example spreads from PLY and WEFT). We will collect and reflect technical, intuitive, historical, and theoretical knowledge from knitters the world over with the intent to inform, reflect, and inspire. We want to support our amazing and diverse knitting community (knitters, fiber producers, indie fiber artists, writers, designers, and others who love knitting as much as we do), gather and share the information we all need and want, and also reflect the community in a real way. And we want to do all of this with a focus on kindness and community. On the pages of PURL, you can expect to see knitters you easily recognize, names you might have heard before, and altogether new voices. You can add your own voice to our efforts – everyone has something to say, and we want a range of diverse knitters' voices in our magazine!

PURL Magazine’s purpose is to serve as a kind of encyclopedia of knitting knowledge – a stamp of the current moment in knitting time, a record of the evolving line of knowledge stretching out behind us, and a curious look toward the future. Each issue will be printed on quality paper with a printable spine so that, well into the future, you’ll be able to easily access the information within. Issues are themed so we can dig deep into a topic, get to its core, explore different viewpoints and issues, experiment, and learn all we can about it. In the interest of diversity and a never-ending quest for knowledge, we go out of our way to find new and interesting authors, thrilling topics, historic and important things, and delve into ideas we  take for granted. How it works, why it works, where it comes from, who’s doing it: these are the things we’re interested in – the things we'll ask writers to explore.

Knitting is an ongoing journey; we aren’t looking for an ultimate answer. In knitting, there’s often no such thing. To that end, you’ll find PURL Magazine exploring various approaches to the same concept, technique, or project and encouraging knitters everywhere to find themselves in their knitting. It will not be uncommon to find divergent opinions in a single issue of PURL, because that’s how the (knitting) world really is. We’ll do our best to carefully present the available facts and opinions so you can find among them the truth that works for your own knitting hands.

We’re excited about knitting and we know you are as well – we (Jacey Boggs Faulkner and Karen Robinson) hope you’ll join us in our exploration of everything it has to offer!

• First issue will be shipped Autumn 2026 (August)
• PURL Magazine will be quarterly, published February, May, August, and November
• PURL, like PLY and WEFT, will have a low ad to content ratio with less than 20% advertising (instead of the regular 50%-70% you see in most magazines).
• Subscription prices will be:
  • Digital only: $30/year
  • USA, print and digital: $45/year
  • Canada, print and digital: $50/year
  • Everywhere else, print and digital: $68/year

Find out more about PURL Magazine on its website as well as through the Kickstarter!