Attention all craft addicts! If you work with yarn or fiber arts in any way, shape, or form, and haven’t tried out Ravelry, you really need to high tail you caboose over there and check it out! I have been knitting and crocheting since I was 10, and have been online for years, but had never come across anything quite like Ravelry. This amazing, FREE site, is a treasure house of patterns, ideas, and information for knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, and dyers.
It’s a combination of an online community, a pattern library and a tool box to help you organize your patterns, projects, and ideas. It’s like someone put the best of Facebook, Etsy, Amazon, Ebay and your favorite craft forums into a blender and mixed them all together, then tailored them just for yarn addicts! It’s like heaven…I can get sucked in for hours.
Membership is free, as are many of the patterns. There are some patterns for sale, and they often go on sale. These patterns are created by frugal moms just like you- some working, some stay at home moms, and some professional designers. Some have websites, some have Etsy stores, but they all have Ravelry stores! So if you’re creative and looking for a source of income this may be a great opportunity to generate a little extra cash, maybe just enough to cover your crafty passions (or maybe not- it’s easy to spend money on yarn!)
The site is really clean and easy to use, and their tutorials are amazing. It truly is a joy to spend time there.
Ravelry’s business model is very interesting. There are often 4000 or more users on at a time, from all over the world. They have millions of patterns in their database and over four million registered users! I can tell you from experience, that running a site that large gets really expensive, really fast. But you’ll only see ads relevant to crafters, and they are very tasteful. They are also very open about how they support their website. You can about it read here.
If you happen to mosey on over there and sign up, feel free to friend me! My username is FrugalMoms2. You’ll see the projects I’m working on and can even look at what I have in my pattern library and what I’ve favorited. It’s really a lot of fun.
See you there!
Kim 🙂
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