Ravelry.

If you haven’t yet heard, there’s a new community site coming soon, just for knitters, spinners and crocheters, called Ravelry. A number of us (well, several thousand) have been added to the beta, with new people being added every day.

I was invited to join a few weeks ago, after waiting about a month on the list. Even as I was filling out my profile, I wasn’t sure how I could contribute to Ravelry and what I would get out of it. My trepidations soon vanished when I saw the incredible range of information and participation that was unfolding there.

When you log in, you see several tabs near the top of your screen: my notebook, patterns, yarns, people, forums, groups and the obligatory help tab. I have to say, I’ve never used the help tab. I’ve had too much fun exploring the site on my own.

For example, in your notebook you can log your projects past and present; you can catalogue your stash; you can create a queue of projects you’re planning to knit someday soon or sometime far in the future; you can mark other people’s projects, patterns and yarn as a favourite, and then see them all together in one place; you can make other members your friends, and then find out on one page what their recent activities on the site have been and what, if anything, has been posted on their blogs.

Plus there are groups to join, needles and hooks to organize, books to place on your virtual bookshelf, a message box, a place to link your blog posts to your related projects, a page where you can contribute your personally designed patterns and your handspun yarn, and finally a page where you can keep track of your purchases from the site and your donations to keep it going.

For example, I made a particularly annoying mistake in the dreaded feather and fan lapghan many rows back: I purled half a row where I should have knit. It’s clear that I can’t drop stitches down to the offending row, reorient the stitches and latch them back up again. So I went on the Techniques forum and posted my problem. By the following day there were fourteen posts proposing different solutions, exploring the ramifications of those solutions, looking at other options…it was exhilarating! (And it was very effective–one of the solutions turned out to be perfect, and I’ll be implementing it shortly.)

Like Facebook, this is one of those sites where once you start participating, you’ll find it almost impossible to stop. If you want to get invited, head over to the main page and put yourself on the beta tester waiting list. I highly recommend it. Fair warning though: once you’re hooked, you’ll find enough knitting inspiration to keep you busy well into the next decade!