Thursday, July 19, 2007

Ravelry and Me

Okay, I am hopelessly hooked on Ravelry. Aside from the hours a day I spend perusing the site, it is a healthy addiction!

It has motivated me to learn (primitively) to use a digital camera; it has forced me to take a good hard look at my stash (hell no, I'm not taking photos of every skein of yarn I own but I did organize them); it has led me to evaluate (frog) a bunch of WIP's that didn't deserve to see the light of day; and it has inspired me to start a queue of potential projects.

Good things, all.

I've also listed all my books which I have to admit I thought was a pretty lame exercise until I discovered that when you click on a book, it links to the individual projects and all the Ravelry users who have made said project. Incredibly cool - useful - brilliant even.

The only downside to the Ravelry addiction is the loss of knitting time. Yup, I spend more time Ravelrying than I do with needles in hand. But I figure the novelty will wear off soon enough.

Ravelry has also made me realize that I should start a blog. It's something I've been thinking about since I discovered knitting blogs a couple of years ago. But as much as I wanted to have one, I really didn't know where to begin. Ravelry helped me with that too. (Okay, this post is starting to read like an incredibly cheesy personal testimonial so enough with the Ravelry worship.)

Here go the basics: I wake up in the morning thinking about knitting and fall asleep at night thinking about knitting.

I'd say I'm an intermediate knitter. I can do all the basics, have decent color sense, and generally am smart enough to knit a swatch first. But of course all is not perfect. In fact yesterday I spent my knitting time frogging two projects that were done but weren't making me happy. In fact, they were embarrassing. The yarn deserved better. I'm relieved that they're gone.

I've been knitting for something like thirty years. And have loved yarn and handknit stuff since I was a young kid. My most cherished possession is an afghan knit by my great-grandmother. It was given to my grandmother in 1926 as a wedding present. It's a gorgeous array of hexagons knit out of fingering yarn. In fact it's my heading. Enjoy!

2 comments:

CatBookMom said...

Wahoo! Got a good start here, girlfriend! I don't know how much I can help, since I stumble around Blogger too, but I'm available FWIW.

Knitting for 30 years and you think you're intermediate? Guess I've got a long way to go then, since I've only been knitting 4 years (in this decade).

SueJ said...

Good start with the blog, but its something else that becomes addictive! I've three! One for me and two for school (plus the secret diary of a teacher one that acts as a journal for when I forget stuff!)