Stuff and Things and Whatnot

I’ve been waiting patiently for Ravelry to either go live or send me a beta invite, but it’s getting tough, what with all the shout outs from other Sockapalooza knitters. The idea is this: you enter all sorts of information about your knitting — finished objects, stash contents, needle collection, works in progress, to-do items, etc. — and then it cross-references everything with everybody else in the community. You can see what somebody else did with that yarn you’ve been sitting on and waiting to use until you come up with the right pattern. You can look up a pattern and see what yarn substitutions other folks have made. You can link in your photos from Flickr (of which I don’t have many yet, but this is a strong enticement to enhance that collection) and make a repository of your knitting life. Link in with your blog, and you’re good to go. It’s so darn attractive to the fiber lover in me, as well as to the computer nerd and librarian. I know it’ll be a huge time vacuum once I’m in, but it seems so darn useful, it’s a trade I’m willing to make.

In the meantime, I’m still using my big ol’ finished object notebook.

I have to update it a bit, but just about everything I’ve knit in the last two and a half years is in here, along with the ball band from the yarn, a little snip of a yarn sample, the start and completion dates, and varying other information.

Ravelry won’t replace the physical collection of patterns and yarn samples, but it will make it a lot easier to be consistent about the kind of information I keep about my knitting projects. I can’t wait to get in.