Have you heard of Ravelry.com?  I’d be very surprised if you haven’t as everyone’s been whispering about it for months.

It’s an online knit and crochet community which works as a personal organiser for your projects, stash, needles, books and patterns. You can link up with other ravelry users in the many forum groups. It was started in 2007 by Jessica and Casey Forbes in Boston, USA and has an international following – over 190,000 users at the last count.

To join you need to sign up for an invitation – which takes around 4 days to land in your inbox – this is so that they can control the amount of people who join each day and so they can answer any queries from new members quickly.

It is also totally free!

There is an abundance of free patterns on there (plus ones that you can buy) and lots of ‘big names’ in the knitwear design world are there. If you like the look of a pattern you’ve got in a book or a magazine – chances are you can find it on ravelry and see how other people’s experiences of knitting the pattern were – and it satisfies my nosiness to see what my online friends have been knitting. You can link your completed items to your blog posts and have your blog showing on your profile page (though only one at the moment – I have 3 4). I’ve still not explored ravelry to it’s full potential but I will get around to it.  You can find me here.

Now I just need to find somewhere to satisfy the stitcher in me 🙂