Celebrating My 3rd Ravel-versary!

Yeah for Ravelry...let's celebrate!

Wow, time flies…today marks my third Ravel-versary! I joined Ravelry on October 23, 2007, three years ago after waiting a long six weeks for my invite to finally arrive from Jess aka frecklegirl. It was about six months after Ravelry was publicly announced that I found out about the site while trying to find knitting information by Googling on the web for a pattern or yarn or something….much like Jess had done before Ravelry was born. Jess spent so much time trying to find other knitting information on the internet on other peoples blogs and shared her frustration with Casey aka CodeMonkey. He, being the programmer, conceived of a internet community that would be full of knitting, crochet and other yarn-ness that would make a fiberholic feel like they were home.

Today when I received a happy birthday message from a fellow Raveler I was curious as to why, as my birthday is in May. When I looked at my profile I realized that today is the day that I joined Ravelry in 2007. I decided to celebrate and travel back in time to the beginnings of Ravelry itself. I visited Jess’ profile and read her old blog entries that chronicled the “big project” that she and Casey were working on. Here’s a prototype of Ravelry at it’s conception on April 12, 2005. Click on the screenshot for a enlarged version on Jess’ blog. This is Casey’s vision from the night before.

screenshot of Ravelry prototype, April 12, 2005

The concept of Ravelry was starting to take shape, but it would be another 2 years before the site was ready for the public. Ravelry was officially announced in May 2, 2007.

I don’t know about you, but Ravelry has been an incredible community and expanded my knitting, spinning, weaving, dyeing and all things fiber related experiences to a whole new level. I have learned from other Ravelers so many tips, tricks and great new ideas and inspirations that it’s mind blowing. I have made countless number of friends on Ravelry….2,552 friends as of today. I have photographed and posted 83 projects to date. I now have a knitting history that I can go back to. I can’t begin to tell you how helpful that is at times. I recently picked up my Fair Isle sweater that I started in January of 2008. I was pretty sure I was knitting a Large size by the measurements of the finished garment. I was absolutely certain it was the large by reviewing my projects page. I was able to figure out where in the chart I left off and start knitting again. I dyed the wool for this sweater so there aren’t any ball bands to look at. Ravelry projects had it all for my reference….how cool is that?

A day doesn’t go by that I’m not on Ravelry. I start my morning with a cup of coffee and a few minutes on Ravelry. I like to send my friends a happy birthday greeting. I started doing this a couple of years ago and in the beginning I was able to bring up all the people having birthdays on the current day. I went page by page to find the little “friend” icon by the birthday person’s profile. That wasn’t to bad when there were 9 or 10 pages of birthday people to go through. Now there are 20 or more pages each day. Casey has always been working to improve features in Ravelry and he made this daily task for me much simpler by adding the ability to click a box and let the Ravelry database find your friends amongst all the birthday folks. This is just a drop in the bucket compared to all the cool search features he did for patterns, yarns, and all the other neat stuff that Ravelry has evolved into.

I don’t know about you, but I wonder how the world would have been without Ravelry….I shudder to think. I am so thankful to have a great community to share my knitting forays with like-minded fiberholics. If you don’t know about Ravelry yet, then you better go here and join. What are you waiting for?