Are you Raveled Yet?

Ravelry.com is a new online knit and crochet community. The index page of the Ravelry website says “organize. Organize your projects, stash, needles and more”, “share. Show off your work. Share your ideas and techniques”, and “discover. Find new designs and yarns. Make friends. Try new things”. That pretty much sums it up, I think. I am currently on the wait list for an account, but I have seen the inside through someone else’s account, and let me just say, I’m excited. This is revolutionary for the online fiber community, and we’ve been waiting for something like this to come along, to organize us and bring us together.

Some of the features of Ravelry include: organizing your projects and your stash; seeing what other people are working on and what they are using their stash yarns for; joining groups with similar interests; finding new projects; seeing how the same project can look in different yarns, joining a community of interest; and making friends. One of the things that most excites me about becoming a user of Ravelry is the inspiration that I am sure will become a detriment to my bank account, but also seeing what others may be doing with some yarn that I have been hoarding in my stash, waiting for that elusive “perfect project”.

The website is still in its beta stages, so the users are currently limited, at least until the operators get their grown-up servers and networking hardware in place and tested out. A recent post on their news blog indicates that there are currently 8300 users and, as of August 19^th, their new hardware was shipping and they were anticipating being able to crank up the invites soon. Meanwhile, for those of us who are anxious to join, you can sign up for their waitlist and periodically check where you stand on the list while you salivate at the prospect of becoming a member.