Don’t have a Ravelry account yet? What are you waiting for! Ravelry is an excellent tool for yarn lovers, making it easy to discover new patterns, organize your stash, and get to know a community of like-minded crafters. If you’re new to Ravelry, or you haven’t been using it much, here’s my advice for getting started.

First, if you don’t have an account yet, create one! It’s easy and free. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be asked to fill out a public profile in which you can share as much (or as little) information as you would like about yourself, including if you have a blog, links to social media, and more. This is helpful if you’re running a craft-related business or to help you connect with new fibre friends! You can use your privacy settings to control if people can see when you’re online, how and when people can send you messages and chat, and how public your information is.

The main four tabs that I encourage you to explore are the patterns, yarn, people and groups tabs. Each of these will take you a valuable function of Ravelry!

• Patterns
  Looking for your next project? This is a great way to find it! Ravelry makes it easy to search patterns by name, category and much more (including by weight and yardage needed which is perfect for stash busting). It’s a great way to discover new patterns and support indie patternmakers.

• Yarns
  This tab is the perfect way to explore yarn trends and get a fibre fix without having to leave the house (or wait for your new order to arrive). Use this tab to see yarns sorted by the number of active projects they’re being used in; it’s a great way to get an idea of how to use that trendy new yarn you’ve been seeing on Instagram. You can also use this tab to search for yarns by brand, name, fibre content and more, or simply browse.

• People
  Use this tab to start building your own community on Ravelry! You can search for people you know and follow their accounts - strike up a conversation or check out what their upcoming projects are.

• Groups
  Groups are a great way to engage with people; while there are lots of general interest groups, the main types are general, KALs (or crochet-along), and swap groups. Come join my Ravelry group, the Allison Barnes Yarnies.

In future posts, I’ll share some of the excellent ways that you can put Ravelry to use for organizing your stash, acting like a WIP journal, and as a discovery tool. If you aren’t a Ravelry fan yet, get started by poking around in the features I discussed in this post and you’ll be a convert soon!