My daily trip to the email box yielded my invitation to the new fiber site, Ravelry. I admit , I was starting to feel left out of the revelry that the podcasters and bloggers who belonged were talking about.
Unfortunately my invitation was read on my lunch break and I had to wait until last evening to really take time to become acquainted with the site. To begin, one starts by filling out a profile with as much or as little information as one is willing to impart. You probably know the drill. Thats when the fun begins. The notebook is an area that lets you comprehensively inventory your yarn, needles, projects in gory detail. You can then add photos from your flickr account to illustrate your stash and projects. The stash can be labeled with a project idea or you can earmark the unloved skein for sale or swap. The benefits, along with gaining an understanding of what you own, are inclusion in Ravelry's database of projects, finished, in progress, queued, or stashed using that yarn. Brilliant. Now I can type in the name of that pesky skein that I can't seem to find a project for and find instant inspiration and some reviews of the yarns performance. All this info link back to other blogs that I never new existed. I can inventory my books, needles of all sizes and types, and my projects that are complete or in the works. The site goes a bit further and matches your profile with those who also shared your projects at one time or another. There is an internal mailroom with which to make contact. After about a day, your public profile will find your blog feed and place a miniature picture of your start page along with a list of your most recent blogposts. As I was drunkenly careening through Ravelry's corridors, I received 3 messages, 2 from old friends, Amy and Scarlett, whose blogs I already enjoy.
Does all this activity take time away from knitting. Well, in my case, you bet. My take on this is that once the initial time is spent cataloging your stuff, all you have to do is dust and polish occasionally. The benefits, to this knitter, are incalculable. I so impressed with the work that has been done by Casey and Jesse, that this is a service that I'm will to pay for.