Miscellaneous: June 2007 Archives
The last two days have seen a little knitting, but a lot of general lack of motivation. I'm not sure whether to chalk this up to being 34 weeks pregnant or just to the weather, but clearly it doesn't lead to that much that is bloggable. So instead of rambling too much, I thought I'd just share a picture I took a little while ago that makes me happy and is one of the elements of my baby's nursery -- though not quite in the right color scheme.
One of the only things I regret about being in the city and having a lot of shade in the lot our house sits on is that I can't really grow a butterfly garden. Perhaps Z and I will just have to do that at my parents house. I like the idea of my baby's life being filled with butterflies.
I'm considering myself to be a lucky knitter these days. About a week ago I received my invitation to participate in Ravelry. I found out about Ravelry a while ago when Cara first talked about it on her blog. I am always ever so curious about knitting community projects -- especially ones that people have nice things to say about -- that look to involve organizational tools for knitting. So I trundled on over there and put my name on the waiting list to get to try it out and be part of their widening beta test.
Last week I got my invitation to come and join the party (before I go any farther, you should all know that they are letting people in in the order that they put their name on the list, and they are letting people in as fast as they think the system can tolerate new people -- there's no favoritism going on here). I clicked the link, got signed up and have had a real blast playing around in the Ravelry sandbox. As a knitter and a sometimes coder/webmonkey, this is one of those things that I wish I had thought of myself. It's well thought out, easy to use, and fun. Fun to the point of kind of being addictive -- I just can't seem to stop myself from plugging in my projects, stash, needles and books from my knitting library. And when I take a break from that, it's fun to go trolling through looking for friends, seeking out interesting new patterns, and seeing what other yarns people have been making some of my old favorite patterns in. Heck. I even opened up a Flickr account so that I can use the photo importing feature.
Want to see what else is being put together for Ravelry? Just click here -- Jessica and her husband Casey, have put together a screen shot tour that describes it all (what it is and what it isn't) better than I can.
Ravelry is a very cool tool and a blast to play with. I really hope that Jessica and Casey are successful getting this thing going and ramping it up. If you do go on over and put your name in to be invited, please remember that it's still in beta (i.e. still not entirely ready for prime time as far as the developers are concerned) and please BE PATIENT and charitable in your thoughts if you have to wait. This is a two person show, folks -- and I think both of those people have full time jobs that don't involve developing a cool website for the knitting community -- and it's being put together as a free resource. It's clear that Jessica and Casey want to make this something that every knitter can participate in and enjoy, but that they also want to release something that can handle a lot of people and that provides a good use experience. That process takes time.
And cool, well built things like Ravelry are very much worth waiting for!
