I finally did it – I finally joined ravelry. And you know what? I love it. I now understand what all the hype was about. I was so wrong about what I imagined would be a den of cliquery and weird bloggy elitism. I was so so very wrong, and I apologize for having dismissed it as such in the first place (hence my stubborn refusal to join). It’s actually quite egalitarian, I found. And what a fabulous resource for patterns and information it is! It is so wonderfully organized. I am just totally loving it. I have kind of been doing the “hit-and-run” thing where I peek in for a few minutes here and there to check messages and organize my stash and projects. I only checked out the groups and forums last night at like 1 AM when I couldn’t sleep because I was over-tired from an exhausting week capped off with guests for the weekend (I should have just gone to bed as soon as I got home from knitting). I was planning to upload the rest of my stash today, but it’s rainy and crappy and there is no light coming into the apartment. It will have to wait until tomorrow. In the meanwhile, I’m just adding more patterns to my queue and checking out the forums. Pretty interesting stuff.

It’s funny because the main reason I was prompted to join up was because it’s gotten to the point where it is almost impossible to have a conversation with a fellow knitter in which they don’t reference ravelry at least 5 – 10 times. I was completely out of the loop. I would sit at any knit night and feel like Donny, out of my element, struggling to keep up with the discussion because I had no idea what anyone was talking about with ravelry-this and ravelry-that and ravel-ravel-ravel, and that’s not even to mention the folks with the ravelry links on their blogs that would lead me to a grinding halt at the ravelry home page as I clicked away to check out what they were referencing/linking to. Normally, I don’t care about being the odd one out, but I think lately it’s all starting to get to me, what with me being the only person in Cambridge without a PhD and probably being the only Nuyorican in a 20 mile radius. I feel like I would love to just be on the same page as everyone else if only for a few minutes, and with this, well, in some small sense, it feels like I am on the same page (sometimes even literally). I feel connected, or at least, I feel like I’m finally speaking the same language as everyone else.

Anyhoo, that was probably TMI (and clearly I’ve been living inside my head too much lately), but ummm, look! Here’s the latest WIP I posted, socks for Matt using Sock Hop in Light My Fire, same pattern as my pair here: