Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Ravelry

A few things I've learned from and about Ravelry:

1. You have to be a Ravelry member to see the content, so if you send a link of your projects to a non-knitting friend to show off. Well, all will be lost.

2. You can look up a member by ID, name, email address and blog.

3. Once you find someone's profile you can add her to your friends. You don't need her permission to do so, but she will get an email on Ravelry that you have added her to your friends. Hopefully she will appreciate your friendly gesture and add you to her friends as well.

4. You can look up designers by their names, and if they are on Ravelry you can add them to your friends as well.
5. Once you have all these friendly knitters in your friends list, you can click on "friend activity" to see what your friends have added to their queues and projects; click on "friends' blogs" to see latest entries on your friends' blogs. That way you don't have to check on each individual blog every day to see who among your friends is in the writing mood.

6. In the "friend activity", a queued project links to a pattern; click on it and it will take you to the pattern page. From there you can click on "add to faves" or "to queue". Some days I find two or three friends queue the same project.

7. Back to "friend activity". Big Time Knitter's Master Piece is your friend Big Time Knitter's own project, Master Piece, that she's working on or finished. Click on it and you'll see the project page. Click on "add to faves" to add this particular project to your faves (use the button often, it makes people happy, at least me). If the project is linked to the pattern, click on it and then you can "add to faves" or "to queue".

8. From "my notebook", click on "queue" to view your what's in your queue, grab the little green arrows to move projects up and down.

9. Click on "favorites" to see what you've accumulated in the stack, projects (with the knitter's picture), patterns, designers, etc.

10. There are many groups on Ravelry, but I don't find them very inspiring. The only conversation that I enjoyed reading was on Asian Knitters group about where everyone came from. A knitter I met in this group, Svetlana (Korean grew up Russian and now in US), is incredibly talented. Her latest creation is a jacket she saw in a German magazine. She knitted it up from a picture, took her all three days. Check her out.

11. If you are still reading, my Ravelry ID is bitsnpieces, be my friend and make me happy.

12. Last but not least, there is going to be a Ravelry's mingle at Stitches West on the Thursday evening before Market Preview. Anyone going?

5 comments:

Fae said...

Thanks for the Ravelry hints. I've got my friends' activities in my RSS feed through Google Reader, but the display on Ravelry is also nice. I think the queued projects spread from one person to the next as they view each others' activity. Have you found a way to delete from your queue? I haven't. I'd like to delete when I turn it into a wip.

Vivian said...

I just figured this out the other day. Once you have the queue open, On the right hand side of the picture there are three little icons, a garbage can (or eraser, too small to tell) for delete, a pencil for edit and a pair of needles for cast on. Too bad they don't have an easier way to move from queue to project.

Cris said...

It was thanks to your help last Friday that on Sun. I actually added stuff to Ravelry. These hints are great. Ravelry has many features so the learning curve is steep and it's a bit intimidating. I didn't understand the Big Time Knitter's Master Piece information. Is this a link or something? Also do you use the Tags field? Oh and that reminds me, I see you use batch names on flickr, how does that work? Is that how you set up a slide show. Gosh Vivian, this just proves that no good deed goes unpunished! LOL You write a few helpful hints and I ask you 100 questions.

Unknown said...

ravelry? *scratching head*

Pooch said...

I enjoy the group "Ravelry Games". Have you ever checked it out? Ah, well, perhaps I'm easily amused!!

:)