Tin Can Knits is the collaboration of two Canadian designers; Alexa Ludeman and Emily Wessel.
NEW for 2024: Our FREE app makes knitting patterns simpler to use, more supportive, and higher value! It includes ten free patterns, and we’re working to add more of our free and paid patterns to the app soon - download it today!
Designing together since 2010, we’ve published 10 pattern collections, the free Simple Collection learn-to-knit series, and a collaborative ebook that raised over $90,000 for malaria prevention. Our business has grown alongside our families, so our collections are a window into our evolving design style and our rapidly growing little ones! Read our story.
Tin Can Knits patterns are:
We design for all sizes
Clearly written and professionally tech edited, our patterns have a straightforward style. We create helpful resources, list errata, and it's easy to contact us directly.
If we didn’t love knitting it, we won’t publish the pattern! This means we often use seamless knitting techniques, and like to keep things simple.
Knitting is FUN, right?
We LIKE pretty, but we’re not ABOUT pretty. We’re about FUN.
On Instagram
In our patterns, our images, our stories and our customer support emails, we aim to create and speak in ways that are:
- Fun - We like pretty, but we're not about pretty. We're about fun.
- Adventurous - We feel life, parenting and business invite us to venture outside our comfort zone.
- Caring - We continually strive to improve our work, so it brings you pleasure and meets your needs.
- Valuable and High Quality - We aim to make work you value; to bring you joy, encourage you to adventure, and allow you to share knitting with your friends and family too.
Our mission
We inspire, guide, and support knitters through our joyful pictures and stories, excellent knitting patterns, free learning materials, and prompt customer service.
Our vision
An inclusive community of knitters creating something joyful and learning something new.
Our commitments to equity, diversity, inclusion and anti-racism
With our actions as designers and individuals we aim to contribute to change that increases equity, respect, safety, and support for those who hold marginalized identities.
- When selecting yarns to use, events to attend, publications to design for, and products to promote, we will ask questions about provenance, process, and inclusivity practices.
- We will work to improve the inclusivity of the stories we tell, the images we share, and the patterns we publish.
- For images, this means creating beautiful, accessible images with a range of diverse models.
- For stories, this means editing our content and language, keeping in mind how it may either reinforce harmful cultural norms, or challenge them.
- For patterns, this means extending our size range, working to make our patterns more accessible to those with visual impairments, and expanding our catalog of helpful tutorials and free patterns.
- Ongoing learning on topics of social justice, anti-racism, and inclusion is both a business and personal responsibility.
- We will regularly reconsider our business practices through the lens of accessibility, inclusion, and service to all knitters.
Land acknowledgement
As part of our commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, we respectfully acknowledge the Indigenous peoples who, for millennia, have stewarded the land now known as Canada. The relationship between European settlers and First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people continues to be fraught from a long history of colonization, forced assimilation, family separation, displacement, land theft, and violence. Recently, Canada began taking steps towards healing and reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of this land. And while it is only a start, we would like to acknowledge and honor the traditional inhabitants of the unceded territory we occupy.
We were born and raised on the traditional territories of First Nations. Emily is from Vancouver Island and grew up on the ancestral lands of the K’ómoks First Nation, Tla’amin Nation, and Homalco First Nation. Alexa grew up and still lives on the traditional lands of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Squamish Nation, Stó:lō Nation, and Musqueam people.
With deep respect for the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people whose territories were taken from them in the formation of Canada, we acknowledge the truth that we are settlers on Indigenous lands. As such, all ebooks from Tin Can Knits will now include recognition of the people whose ancestral lands we photograph, and all events will include a land acknowledgement.