I’ve been subscribed to Vogue Knitting for a few years. I’m not sure I’ve ever knit anything from it, but the best of the issues I’ve got are full of wonderfully inspirational patterns with all kinds of interesting twists, and of fascinating and useful articles about knitting techniques and culture. It was in a completely different universe from the British knitting magazines I’ve occasionally bought (and almost always regretted).
Recent issues have been less full of the good stuff, smaller overall, and with a higher proportion of patterns I really don’t like. Then they announced a name change to VK International, which I barely noticed. Then a mysterious magazine called Designer Knitting, with a naff-looking cover, arrived through my letterbox about the time I was expecting VK. I wondered if it was some kind of freebie, launching a new magazine on the readers of an existing one, but the familiar typography and design, and the absence of the real VK eventually forced me to conclude that the name had changed again, but this time with no announcement at all. The DK website referenced in the magazine wasn’t online, there was nothing on the VK website about the new name, and only a handful of puzzled and inconclusive posts on Ravelry (there are more now, although they don’t seem to be much more conclusive).
The second issue of DK arrived yesterday. It’s short, there are hardly any articles, and I’m not especially interested in most of what there is. And although some of the patterns are quite interesting, lots of them are boring or nasty, and there’s nothing in there that grabs me like some things in Twist (coughsylviecough). And the editor’s letter hasn’t been changed to reflect the different cover image. For some reason, that bugs me most of all.
So I’m trying to cancel my subscription. This has already taken more time than I expected, with the DK website (now finally online, but not yet featuring the current issue) giving me no unsubscription information, and only an email address to contact. After exchanging several messages, the guy on the end of the email and I conclude that my subscription must be with VK themselves (not that I can tell, since I’ve had no communication from them at all, including when they were planning to auto-charge my credit card). So the current state of play is that I’ve sent them an email (since their website also lacks any mechanism for unsubscribing), and await their reply. I feel sure that it shouldn’t be this hard.