Knitting net

Sometimes people who visit the knitting store are surprised to see me surfing the web. They're even more surprised when they ask me "What can I make from this yarn?" and I show them screens and screens of nifty things other people have made from it. The Internet has become an incredible resource for knitters.

Here are some of my favourite sites.

My first inkling that there were some treasures out there came when I stumbled upon www.knitty.com. Knitty is a quarterly web-based magazine that's full of news, techniques, and above all funky, makeable patterns. It's where I go first when I want an idea for a hat or a pair of socks or a sweater or something - like a bottle cozy or a mitten for dog-walkers or something else with a different twist.

Knitty has tutorials, too, like how to cast on (I never suspected there were so many ways to do it) or a worksheet for knitting socks from the toe up (making it a bit more complicated than I do).

Knitty is also a community. The coffeeshop has many rooms for knitters of varying skills and interests, and is a great guide for finding wool shops in foreign cities.

I've been giving Knitty less attention recently, though, ever since I was invited to join Ravelry. Ravelry is kind of like Facebook for knitters. It's still in beta, but already it has tens of thousands of members from over 100 countries. Most of us use it as a place to catalogue all the yarn we have in our stashes, all the things we'd like to knit, and all the projects we've got in progress, finished or given up on. That would be pretty useful in itself, but the strength of Ravelry is the way we all have access to each other's info. That way I know what Jane in South Australia has done with her Handmaiden SeaSilk and whether she liked it, and I can let the world know that Bernat Denim really sucks.

When I'm at the yarn shop (Knit and Caboodle) I have Ravelry on all the time. It's a way of checking to see what size needles people really use for a yarn, what yardage they get, what a pattern looks like on real people when it's made up. And it's kind of an advertisement for our shop, too - several visitors have dropped in because I've mentioned that I bought a particular yarn here. When we're travelling this summer I'm going to use Ravelry to track down yarn shops in the places we visit.

Maybe the most surprising resource is YouTube. It's full of videos that show you how to do tricky knitting things. You can learn how to knit socks on longish circular needles, or how to knit Turkish (and Portuguese) style, or a fancy new way of casting on. I use it all the time now that I've discovered there's more to knitting than I learned 50 years ago.

The Internet is a knitter's friend.