If you read any number of knitting blogs, you will have already heard of Ravelry.

I was luck enough to hear about Ravelry quite early on in it’s quest for Beta testers and got my invite in July. If you want to look me up, my username is the fabulously imaginative “susancrowe”….

For those of you who have assumed I am now blogging in another language – I’ll explain that….

Ravelry = A community driven website where you record data and pictures of all your knitting and crochet projects, books, needles, hooks and yarn. If you’ve already blogged it, you can link to your blog post! It also has forums! Yours and everybody else’s projects are then in a huge searchable database.

So….imagine if you are thinking about knitting a certain pattern, you can look it up in Ravelry and see that there are 20 people who’ve made it, what yarn they used, what they thought of the pattern, problems etc. You can do the same with yarn too! Click the Ravelry link for more info…

Beta Testing = Ravelry is new and is being written and developed as it goes along. It hasn’t been released “Live” to all users yet but is up and running and needs controlled numbers of users to use the complete website and test it’s functionality. Then give feedback on improvements and bugs. That what a beta tester does – go on and use it report back bugs and improvement suggestions but don’t throw a hissy fit if it’s not perfect yet!!

Invites = because it’s not “live” to the general public yet, everybody can’t get on at once so there is a queue to join. When it’s your turn, you get an invite! The anticipation has been driving some knitters quite mad!

I have just got to the point where I have loaded up pictures and details of all my projects that I’ve already blogged about and have just started to load projects “yet to be seen” on my blog.
Not fair on my loyal readers huh?

OK – there’s only one so far – my Daisy Scarf – I’ll show you….

This is the Daisy Scarf from Rowan 38, this book…

And this is the Rowan piccy…

I used the Kid Classic given in the pattern but mine is squishier and softer than it looks in the picture. I suspect it had been starched and blocked to death for the photo shoot!

The pattern is a strange sort of “bunchy stitch”, wrapping the yarn around the needle 3 times then dropping the extra wraps on the next row and knitting them together to make the swirl (Don’t try and knit it from that description – you’ll need the pattern!)

Here’s a close up of the pattern stitch…

It grew really fast and it is a favourite. Especially as I don’t really knit a lot of scarves!

Here’s an “action shot” of the scarf on…

The edging is cute but sewn on afterwards – it felt a bit like a design after thought to me. Then scarf is much better with it though…

I only used two of the three balls called for so I will at some point make some matching gloves (assuming I ever finish the Blankie!)