On a very specific kind of internet addiction
When asked for my UX Academy course what digital product I can’t live without, I went through the rolodex of Instagram, Twitter, the Google suite, Reddit — not uncommon choices and are all often the topic of internet addiction articles. A website I have used longer than any of those, however, is Ravelry.
As a child, my mom owned a yarn store. I spent weekends working there, and I’ve always been “crafty” to some extent. I spend most of my free time thinking about making things, planning projects and, on occasion, actually making things. In my adult life, my best friends came from knitting, and we even have semi-matching sheep tattoos. It’s a very serious hobby.
Ravelry is, at it’s heart, a database for knitting patterns. It allows you go in and search for patterns by kind of project (I want to make a toque!), by yarn (I have 2 balls of this particular kind of yarn already, what have others done with it?), and you can even get wildly specific (I want to knit myself a pullover using fingering weight yarn with 2 colours, I want it to be long-sleeved and have a v-neck — for the record, there are currently 53 options to match this request). The problem this product solves for me is finding knitting patterns I want to make, without having to browse the websites of individual designers or companies, or go into a store or library.
Like any good digital product, Ravelry started with this database as it’s core and has expanded to include other features including groups where people can talk about common (not always knitting-related) interests, to event planning, to chat, to pattern libraries and “stash” management. I certainly don’t use all of them, but I don’t think more than a few days have gone by since I signed up in 2008 that I haven’t checked to see what’s new on the platform.
My only wish is that this model could be expanded for other crafts — there are pseudo-competitors in the sewing community (eg. Textillia, and a couple other now-defunct sites) however none seemed to have caught on, and I haven’t found them nearly as functional. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps the buy-in threshold for a useful community is higher than I would expect.
Even though Ravelry does look and feel like it was ripped out of the mid-2000s, and is currently in the grips of a massively botched UI overhaul, it remains the gold standard in the community and, lord knows, I will continue to visit every day.
