Ravelry

Ravelry is a free social networking website, beta-launched in May 2007. It functions as an organizational tool for a variety of fiber arts including knitting, crocheting, spinning, and weaving. Members share projects, ideas, and their collection of yarn, fiber, and tools via various components. As of November 13th, 2010, Ravelry had over 1 million members worldwide.

Development

Husband and wife Casey and Jessica Forbes founded Ravelry in May 2007. Their idea was to create a web presence for all fiber artists.

“ Ravelry is a place for knitters, crocheters, designers, spinners, and dyers to keep track of their yarn, tools and pattern information, and look to others for ideas and inspiration. 

In addition to serving as a social network site for users to discuss their crafts, Ravelry facilitates micro-business, allowing crafters to sell their patterns or yarns. Both large- and small-scale businesses are able to advertise their wares on the site. The site has been also used by some for market research.

Ravelry has been mentioned by Tim Bray as one "of the world’s more successful deployments of Ruby and Rails technologies.

Features

"Ravelry has become the Internet tool to help the typical needle-wielder navigate through the woolly wild.

Information in Ravelry is organized via a series of tabs. Some customization is available within the tabs: i.e., the ability to re-sort information contained in a tab, create sub-tabs, or change the level of detail displayed. The site was in beta through early 2010. New features and enhancements are still added frequently. Often these features and enhancements are driven by the community.

“ "The community-edited yarn and pattern database is something that has never existed before. If someone else has used a pattern or yarn, no matter how obscure, you can probably find information and project photos on Ravelry. The personal organizational tool is actually entirely public and we were able to create this database by encouraging people who share their projects and information (by using the organizational tools) to contribute to the yarn and pattern directory. ”

Ravelry is an organizational tool for knitters and crocheters. It includes a project album, a yarn stash album/inventory, and a needle inventory sheet. These are all tools for personal organization. It also includes a yarn and pattern database and research tool. This consists of a searchable community-edited yarn and pattern database where users share information and project photos. The database was created by encouraging people to share their projects and information.