So. Ravelry.
I must admit, I had my doubts. Why go to all the trouble of recording your stash, fos, books and needles online, especially if you’re not inclined to do so privately? Would anybody else be interested in the stuff you have? If they’re interested in the stuff you’re making, why not just go to your blog and get a more detailed description? Do we need yet another forum?
Well, the only way to get answers to these questions was to put my name on the list. After all, if I didn’t like it, I could unsubscribe/cancel my account/whatever. (Assuming, of course, that they don’t work like Bravenet where once you sign up, you can’t un-sign up and you’re stuck with their spam forever.)
My Ravelry invite came a few weeks back so I headed over to check things out. At once I could see a huge advantage in all this recording of knitterly stuff. You can investigate a pattern you’re thinking of knitting so much faster google allows, finding out about errors, adjustments to the pattern and successful yarn substitutions. You can also investigate a yarn, and see what others have made from it.
This is very, very useful. It motivated me to put some of my own fos in, thinking that the info might be useful to anyone doing a search on the pattern or yarn used. However, I began to see straight away that entering projects that didn’t use a pattern or yarn in the Ravelry database might not be worth the effort. It’s not going to help anyone and since I’ve already recorded it in my blog why bother putting it in Ravelry as well? Especially when uploading pics into Flickr and setting up the project in Ravelry isn’t exactly fast. This might be worth noting if you just don’t have the time to enter all your fos. Stick to the ones that use patterns or yarns in the database if you’re low on time.
On to other features. I friended a bunch of people with blogs I read. I’m not yet sure what the benefit of this is yet – why not just visit their blogs? – but I’m keeping an open mind. There may be features I haven’t encountered yet. If you know of any, let me know.
Then there’s the groups. Oh my. Much hilarity. There are groups based on knitterly things like shops, podcasts, designers, favourite fibre, needles, knitting groups, etc. Then personal things like location (I joined the Australian Knitters group straight away), name (there’s a group for Abbeys, for example), university, job, car, star sign, hobbies (other than knitting) and more. Oh, and your illness. Think of a condition or disease and you’ll find a “Knitters with …” group for it. Then there’s the fan groups, with groups for everything from books to tv shows to film to radio shows. There’s even a group for knitters who haven’t read Harry Potter books. Just browsing the list of groups gave me many gigglesnorts.
The advantage of so many goups is they’re smaller and more easily navigated than a single forum with all Ravelry’s members. They’re also a lot of fun. I just had to join Knitters with Minis. So far there are two threads discussing which mini we have and it’s nickname, and if we’ve knit anything for our mini yet. (The answer to the latter was ‘no’, which got me thinking about what I could make, and putting the pattern online for my fellow Knitters with Minis.)
But the group title that got the biggest gigglesnort from me was this one:
Knitting Military Spouses*
Wow. It must take an awful long time. Of course, you could just go out and buy yourself a blow up doll, but I guess this one’s for those who like a bit of anticipation in their relationship.
Grammar does matter. It really does.
(*Of course, I have nothing against anything military. This title would have been just as hilarious if it had been “Knitting Martian Spouses” and even more so if it had related to my own line of work: “Knitting Fantasy Writer Spouses”.)
If you ever knit a military spouse I *so* want to see it. I also want to know what you do with it. I will follow its adventures avidly.
Have they posted a pattern yet for a knitted military spouse??!!
I think the best thing about the friends is the “friends activity” tab – I’ve found a lot of great patterns which I’ve queued after looking at that!
And if a pattern (or yarn) isn’t in their database you can add it – I guess that’s how they’ve built up their database, at least in part.
(sorry – am Ravelry fanatic! I can see that it doesn’t blow everyone’s trumpet though!)
Friends activity. Righto, I’ll check that one out. I figured there must be a way to add patterns to the database, as I read somewhere a discussion between a member and someone else about about the member adding the someone else’s patterns.
Was a bit disappointed that only a few patterns from Yarn magazine were there, and issue 4 was missing altogether.
I don’t really have time to be entering patterns – well not yet, anyway.
It keeps changing, but if you have a pattern that’s widely available but not yet in Ravelry, there is usually an opportunity to add it – such things do exist. Otherwise, you can check back periodically to see if someone else has added it. Ditto for the yarn type. I agree that patterns that are personal aren’t really as useful, although I suppose people could search by yarn type.