Thank you so much for checking Ravelry out! One of our goals for the site was to provide a showplace for great independent dyers and spinners and we are so excited to have you on board.
So, what benefits are there to being a part of the Ravelry community?
- A free, clear and concise online design portfolio with information about the patterns (gauge, yarn requirements, needle/ hook sizes, etc)
- We are putting the finishing touches on a low-cost pattern delivery system with Paypal. Ravelry can be used in conjunction with your own site or on its own to deliver pattern .pdfs to users- we will not be charging for this service (although using paypal does have a fee). After purchasing the pattern via Paypal, users can then opt to have it saved in their Ravelry notebook or sent to their email. This system will also give you statistics on your pattern distribution.
- A gallery of finished objects- Ravelry shows that information in the pattern page, which then could be linked on your own personal website.
- You will also be able to view the people working on your designs in one central location. In an ideal world, we'd love to see the designers participate in the pattern pages- contributing corrections, answering questions, etc. (You could subscribe to an rss feed for your patterns, for example.) You can also see what modifications people made, comments on your pattern in Ravelry and out in blogland (blog post integration is built into the site), and what yarns people used in one central location.
How to Get Started with Ravelry
1. Create your account (from the email invitation sent to you), fill in your profile info and photo in the About Me section. Once you have done this, we will connect that profile to your design portfolio and you can edit your patterns' information and add pictures for those designs from your flickr account.
You can also edit the information at the top of your yarn profile page by clicking on the pencil at the top. We have a small questionnaire that we thought might be interesting for users to read, so fill that out when you can!
- What is your design philosophy?
- If you could describe your knitwear with one word, what would it be?
- What is your favorite design of your own so far?
- Who/ what is your design inspiration?
- What is your favorite finished knit?
2. You can also use Ravelry to keep track of your FOs and works in progress. We also have sections for a project queue, yarn stash and needle/ hook inventories in your personal notebook. You can add pictures to your notebook by uploading project and stash pictures into flickr, if you do not already have them in there. (It is important to add your flickr account name into your ravelry profile or importing your photos into Ravelry will not work correctly.)
(To see what it looks like you can go into my frecklegirl notebook- I have information in all those sections.)
3. Finally, we ask that you please subscribe with your favorite newsreader (bloglines, google reader, etc) to our news blog on the front page of the site so we can keep you updated on new features: http://www.ravelry.com/news.rss
Things to Keep in Mind:
Ravelry is in its testing phase- We really would love your input and your reaction to the site, from the perspective of an independent designer. We are looking for general usability critiques, suggestions and *any and all* concerns or comments that you might have while using it. We want it to the best site it can be and can only do that with your help. The site will only be as good as we make it! (I know you are totally swamped right now but let us know whenever you have the time...)
As you can see by the length of this page, we are so excited about this site! We really hope that it will be a way to help independent designers like yourself to get their patterns well- deserved exposure.
(As a side note, we are inviting people in bits and pieces- not because I want it to be exclusive or anything but because we only have one Casey code monkey to keep up with updates and bugs! So please keep this under wraps for the time being...)
If you have any questions about any information on this page, feel free to email Jessica.
Thank you and, again, welcome!!