BP3 - Ravelry

Ravelry is a free Web 2.0 tool for knitters and crocheters. It has a wealth of features to assist fiber artists in organizing and sharing their own projects, finding patterns, organizing their fiber library and communicating with fellow cohorts. This is one of the most comprehensive knitting and crocheting tools available today!

Projects - Ravelry allows you to create project pages that you can use for personal information or to share what you're doing with friends. It allows to to keep incredible details such as pattern used, size made, yarn used, needles used and your notes. Below is a picture of my project page for the Fireworks and Funnel Cake socks I made.

Finding Patterns - Ravelry has a HUGE database of patterns of all sorts. Patterns can be uploaded by designers or publishers as well as users that are creating their own patterns. The search feature is equally as amazing as the amount of patterns. It will let you search based on almost any feature such as fiber content, type of garment/object, techniques used, availability (free, in a book, in your library, etc.) Here is a quick search for baby booties which returned 3,131 patterns!

Library - One of the most annoying things as a knitter is investing in beautiful pattern books that sit and get unused. Or worse yet, knowing there is a perfect pattern in one of your books but not knowing which book it is in. Ravelry solves that by letting you create a library of all the patterns you own. You can add books, magazines, pattern pamphlets and pdf's. Once you have created your library you can search patterns based on whether it is in your library. Below is my library of books. 

Communicating - In addition to all the organization and searching features Ravelry is a community of knitters and crocheters. They are groups you can be a part of and forums to post in. The groups and forums are both knitting related and simply by areas of interest. Here is a group I belong to which is all for folks that make felted bags. It features a forum, recently shared projects of the members, as well as a place to ask for help or search for inspiration. 

If you could only use one web 2.0 tool for knitting Ravelry would have to be it. Not only does it offer a LOT of features, it does all of them well. The best part of all is that the price is free! So get going and sign up for your very own Ravelry account!