So I was checking out the list of sites built with Ruby on Rails when I came across what is possibly the best knitting website in the history of ever.
It’s called Ravelry, and it’s an incredible tool for knitters and crocheters. Ravelry is built around an interactive ‘knitter’s notebook’ with sections for tracking your projects, patterns, books, and other supplies. It will even help you keep track of your yarn stash, something which most knitters had thought to be impossible.
But what’s truly amazing is what happens when the full power of a database-driven web application is put to work organizing your knitting projects.
Ravelry doesn’t just list your yarns, patterns, et cetera; it cross-references everything so you can concentrate on… knitting!
Say you’re browsing the web and you come across a sock pattern you’re just dying to make. you click a bookmarklet, and the pattern is added to your ‘project queue,’ projects you want to make eventually, but not quite yet. From there you can check the yarn requirements against your stash, see what yarn you still need to purchase, find the yarn online, and so on. once you’re ready to begin, you can move the project out of the queue to your active projects, mark your stash yarn as used, and so on.
Ravelry’s other major strength is its social networking features. You can browse other users’ patterns and projects, discuss what your working on and problems you’re having, and so on. plus, if you see something you want to make, Ravelry can tell you if the pattern is in a book you already have, available for download, or where to find it. You can also buy/sell/trade yarn, and probably a million other things I haven’t found yet.
I’ll probably be posting more on this topic later; I just discovered the site, so I’m still exploring.
