I May Regret This Later...

Before I go off on a tangent, I want to thank you guys for your thoughtful comments on the Garter Yoke Cardi. It's immensely encouraging to get positive reviews on a project I never even set out to make : )

Tangent: I've gotten myself a Ravelry account. For the past year, I had been mystified as to why people would blog about Ravelry and you could almost hear their voices getting all hushed in reverence and excitement. Sure, those little progress bars on the sides of pages were cool, but wasn't Ravelry a bit too much like MySpace or Facebook?

(Side tangent: I am hugely leery of sites like MySpace, Facebook, and their ilk. There's just something about them that weirds me out. This is my own personal issue, and I will not rant about either site because I am a blogger, and people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.)

Oh how wrong I was. The breaking point came after I had clicked a link and gotten rerouted to the Ravelry logon page for the umpteenth time. I felt as if I had memorized the color progression in the featured Jaywalker socks, and I just couldn't take it anymore. Like Squintz at the pool, I cracked. And I signed myself up.

My username is shoponhighstreet (no 'the'), for those interested in knittystalking, and within a week, I've added projects, I've added pictures, I've added stash, I've added stash pictures, I've deleted a project, I've built up a queue, I've cataloged all my knitting needles... and I love it. The capacity to identify, quantify, organize, list, label, and cross-reference makes my inner librarian geek out to no end.

It's amazing. I can
--Record in minute detail exactly how much of which yarns I have in my stash, and in which colors
--Cross-reference the project I'm making to see which yarns have been used for it and what other knitters are saying about the pattern
--Make a comprehensive list of which patterns I'm interested in knitting
--Not to mention a zillion other wicked cool things

Those of you who threw yourselves before the juggernaut early on are probably tittering over my naiveté, but I don't mind. I am thrilled to pieces with Ravelry.

(Please get back to me on this topic once I've started grad school and am torn between homework and the dire need to keep my project pictures up-to-date.)