April Fools’ Hats on Ravelry
Ravelry is an online community for knitters and crocheters. It is something like MySpace, but in my experience a much more personal environment.
It has databases full of yarns, patterns, designers, books. You can have a yarn you want to use, look it up and see what others have made from it. You can have a pattern you like and look up what yarns people have used when knitting that design. You can look up a designer and see all the patterns associated with that person.
Or you can find groups (something like Yahoo Discussion Groups) where you can chat about things you have in common. I moderate a group on Ravelry called ColorJoy! which is full of creative folks from all over the world. We talk about any creative projects, not just yarn-related ones. The “spring into existence” projects I’ve been showing you this week have come from people on my Ravelry group.
So today I checked in on Ravelry to see if I needed to do anything there as a moderator. And I saw that everyone’s photo (avatar) was embellished with a hat of some sort. Diana/Otterwise got a hot green hard hat with a yellow star on it. I got a “Cat in the Hat” striped red happy lid. There are newspaper-folded hats, bishop hats, witch hats, wool toques with pom-pom, wizard hats with stars and moons, chef’s white hats, I even saw one parrothead! I love my hat. Such fun!
Things like this are not uncommon on Ravelry. There is a group there called Completely pointless and arbitrary and some time during the winter they all drew blue nosewarmers on their photos/avatars. Just for fun.
If you are interested in participating in this community, go to http://ravelry.com and sign up to be added to the list. They will send you an invitation in a few days, I’m told (at one time it was a several-month wait while they were getting the system up and running).