Unraveled

Welcome to the Ravelry patterns tab! This post will be the first in a tour of the Ravelry navigation tabs. We’re going to break them all down for you so you can feel more comfortable using the site. There are a lot of great features hidden away so I think novices and advanced users could all learn something new!

You can get to the patterns tab by visiting www.ravelry.com/patterns or clicking the patterns tab at the top of your screen, next to your notebook tab. Let’s get started on our tour with the top left side of the screen.

Search Patterns

The first thing you’ll see is a search box. If you know what you want to search for, you can enter your term and hit search to be taken to the advanced search. If you’re not so sure, right underneath that is a link to the advanced search where you can take a browse.

Personalize

If you’d prefer your default advanced search results to include just one craft you can choose it here!

Hot Right Now

This is a list of the patterns that have gotten the most views in the past 24 hours. You can jump right to one of those patterns or visit the advanced search sorted by recent views.

Next up, let’s check out the bottom left.

You’ve Looked At

This is your pattern browsing history. I love this when I know I saw something a friend would love a few days ago but can’t remember what it was – I can click the link to my history page and find it easily.

Recently Added Patterns

The most recently added patterns with photos show up here. The link at the top of the section takes you to a special page just for browsing recently published patterns, which you can filter by category.

That’s the left side of the screen. Now let’s check out the right column.

Browse Categories

Did we know we have 200 pattern categories in our database? These are quick links to see popular patterns in each of those categories.

Designers on Ravelry

Here you can find patterns available as PDF downloads from Ravelry. You can see all of them, or we’ve split them out into free or for sale patterns if you prefer to browse that way.

Your Pattern Highlights

These are newly released patterns that we think you might like. You can go directly to one of these new beauties by clicking on a picture or view all your highlights by choosing the link. (And if you don’t like them and you want to customize them, check out this post from Mary-Heather.)

Finally, let’s round this out with the bottom right part of the page.

Something Random

We grab a random pattern attribute and show you some patterns with it :) It’s a great way to learn about some of the attributes we use to categorize patterns, and see some random eye candy.

Popular Attributes

Just like the random attribute above, this is a sampling of the attributes we use to sort patterns. These are the most popular attributes, so these will change over time. Clicking on one takes you to a list of patterns tagged with that attribute.

Search Projects by Tag

We close out the page with another search field – this one for lets you enter a tag and find projects tagged with it.

So, here ends our tour of the patterns tab. I hope you learned something new and look forward to walking through the rest of the site over the coming weeks!