Knitter, know yourself...

Sometimes I astonish myself with my ability to ignore the things I know about myself.

I know that I find it hard to ignore mistakes in my knitting. And yet I will still leave a beautiful project in a bag, thinking I can ignore the error and keep knitting. Until eventually I wake up and realise that I need to rip out the mistake and correct it. More than a year later!

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Mittens in May

Elizabeth Zimmerman’s call to knit mittens in May — taking time to enjoy the knitting, rather than rushing to prevent cold hands — couldn’t be more fitting for the fun we’ve been having over in our Boost Your Knitting KAL this month. We’ve been exploring the joys of the tidy tubular cast on and working up Sarah Hatton’s terrifically textured Totally Tubular Mittens.

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Boost Your Knitting April Knitalong: The Halfway Point

It’s a bit hard to believe, but April is halfway over, and our monthly Boost Your Knitting KAL is well underway in our Ravelry group, with new lace projects springing up everyday and a few coming out of winter hibernation! It’s been amazing to see not just what everyone’s creating, but also the gusto with which many have embraced the fixing mistakes brief — with knitters fearlessly unraveling problem lace sections and even bravely dropping down mistake-free bits of knitting to practice the technique!

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Ravelry how-to: Adding project photos

We’ve been having a fab time over in this month’s Boost Your Knitting knitalong, which celebrates the tuck stitch! We realize though that, if you’ve never uploaded photos to Ravelry, you might be a little unsure how to add them to your project page and share your progress in the group. Since we’re all about learning new things, we’ve planned a few posts for the next few weeks taking you step-by-step through some of the finer points of Ravelry. Today, we’ll look at how to add photos to your Ravelry project page.

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We are happily knitting along on our lace projects

It seems like every time I log in to my Ravelry account there are loads more posts in the Lace KAL thread! It's a chatty place with no end of inspiring lace projects, hints and tips. If you don't fancy wading through all of the chatter, then I highly recommend clicking the button at the top of the thread so that you can browse through just the photos in the thread, which gives you a more manageable 145 posts (rather than the 1200ish in the whole thread!).

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Cables to tempt you...

I can't believe that the Cables Knitalong is nearly over. We will be awarding prizes sometime next week (along with shipping pre-orders of Something New to Learn About Lace – it's going to be a busy week!). We have had a great time encouraging each other along with our cabled projects, and sharing successes and disappointments along the way. Somehow, having to rip back some knitting isn't quite so bad when you've got a virtual room full of friends to commiserate with you.

I thought I would share just a few of the many beautiful projects that have appeared in the group over the last couple of months. This is just a taster, so do pop over and see for yourself. It's a great way of getting new project ideas! Clicking on any of the images will take you to their project pages so that you can see where the pattern is from, and which yarns people have used, oh and add the projects to your favourites of course!

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Using Ravelry part 2

There are so many different ways to use a website like Ravelry. Many people visit only to purchase patterns, while others use it to keep track of their projects, yarn and books, and still more use the forums to chat online to like-minded crafters. However you choose to use Ravelry, I hope that some of the hints and tips in this article might come in handy.

 

In the first part of this Masterclass series, we looked at the information you can store in your Notebook section of Ravelry, as well as how to use the Pattern and Yarn databases. In this instalment, we will focus on the social side of the website.

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