Unraveled

After seeing Guardians of the Galaxy and noticing baby Groots pop up all over the place, I thought it would be fun to do a TV/movie character related eye candy. Each of these projects were finished in July and August.

I was going to let you guess the inspiration on your own…but then I couldn’t resist pairing each one with a matching shot of the character.

Above: Pollyfoofoo’s Outlander Cowl and Cumberb1tch’s Vulcan top.

Above: SixCraftsUnder’s Tom Baker Dress and Ribbels’ FORBRYDELSEN.

Above: lanib2’s Baby Groot and handknitsbysusan’s Maurice Moss.

I used the advanced search to find these since I only wanted recently completed projects, but if you want to poke around, try putting names or abbreviations for shows into the project tag search (at the bottom of the patterns tab). Here are a few tags for you to try: outlander, got, sherlock, drwho.

Each week, we write a “Community Eye Candy” post that shows off a group of newly finished projects that center around a common theme. If you like, you can use Ravelry’s project search to find your own collections of inspirational or helpful projects.

First, get thee to the project search. Click the search menu in the top bar and then choose the “projects” link

Once you are in the projects search, you’ll see all of the advanced search controls. Som

• The regular search box will search through all of the project information as well as the pattern and yarn that are linked to the project
• In the upper right – Sort: among other things, you can sort by “most favorites” and “most helpful”
• On the filter side bar – Finished in: you can use this to only look at projects that were finished in the last couple months or the last year. Combining this with the sorts can be useful.
• You can use made by friends and group name to look at projects made by people that are in your friends or your groups
• In my stash can be a way to find stash ideas. There is also a “Yarn name” option if you want to look at a particular yarn.
• Limit your search to projects that were not made from a pattern by selecting “no” for linked to a pattern
• ..and especially helpful if you are just looking for ideas: notes and tags let you search inside project notes and tags for specific words or phrases that were entered in those fields. Remember to add quotes if you want to match an exact phrase.

This July, during the Tour de France, 2500 spinners participated in the Tour de Fleece and challenged themselves to meet their spinning goals. The result? 4600 spinning projects were completed this month – that’s double the usual number.

Below, we show the work of a few of this year’s TdF spinners. You can browse through more handspun by looking at the yarns that were shared with the TdF group or by searching the tdf2014 tag in stash.

Above: nahlinse’s Cheerful Disposition (fiber from Three Waters Farm) and winksmom’s Linden.

silmiriel’s …and the garden staged a riot (her own fiber from Abeille Fibre Arts) and squiished’s Save Water: Drink Tequila (fiber from Fondant Fibre).

BellyLaugher’s mad hatter (fiber from Becoming Art) and Ravyn78’s Secretly Spiders (fiber from Nerd Girl Yarns)

Above, we have srz’s spindled Ashland Bay 50/50 Yak/Silk and David’s Pumpkin Luggage which is woven two of his handspun yarns, one made from Spunky Eclectic fiber and one from Hello Yarn.

High fives all around – Tour De Fleece moderators, team mods, and everyone who participated :) TdF is such a cool event. You all challenged yourselves, got some good spinning time in and had a lot of fun with it.

This week we show off some recent projects that were made with a single lonesome skein of yarn:

Above, from left to right: brittney07’s Tropical Paradise , gingergooseberry’s Petite Lisette, and lzi’s Moon Angel.

Above: Meredith0908’s Half Lotus Bunting, BrigitteR’s Bubble Blue(s), and julieasselin’s River Edge.

Above: samy’s Atelier Tricot nordique, ambahobrien’s Magenta Kinta – gradience, and ichigoknitter’s Beans the Cat.

Ravelers in the Netherlands finished 2000 projects in April and May. This week, we’re showing off a few of those projects.

Above, from left to right: Breigh’s Convergence Top, bloemenjansje’s Shetland jumper and some’s Floral Fusion.

Above: Karinita0607’s Hitofude, stilte’s TGV II – Handspun and isa304’s Ariel pixel blanket.

Above: Boknits’ Combination Tee, radiolazy’s noise, metavf’s Easter bunny

I wanted to say something clever in Dutch but the only word that I know is “sinaasappelsap”. My high school spanish teacher taught us a few of his favorite words in other languages, and the his favorite in Dutch was the word for “orange juice” :)

We have a bookmarklet that you can use to quickly transport yourself from a pattern page elsewhere on the web to the corresponding Ravelry page. If the matching pattern page can’t be found, it will instead bring you to the pattern search and fill in the page title as the search text.

To install the bookmarklet on your computer, just drag this button to your bookmarks bar.

An example (using Knitty) is shown below. Click the image to see how it works

If you are on Internet Explorer and dragging doesn’t work, try right clicking and choosing “add to favorites”. You can also use this when mobile if your mobile device syncs from your desktop Safari or Chrome. Chrome on Android users: type “ravel it” into the location bar and activate it from there.

Bonus: you can also use this on Twitter and Instagram to jump to any Ravelry profile that has the matching social site information filled in. Try it out on instagram.com/rainydaygoods or twitter.com/jessicamf.

Nerd Wars is an ongoing competition where teams from different parts of nerddom compete for points by proposing and completing projects in different challenges. Each Nerd Wars tournament offers a number of themed challenges that are 1 month long plus a 3 month “dissertation” project.

Nerd Wars Tournament 10 just ended a few days ago, so now is a perfect time to show a few of the thousands of challenge projects that were completed in April.

I’ve included some “nerd wars” links that will bring you to each creator’s (very cool!) proposal. Read those posts to get a feeling for what Nerd Wars is all about.

Above: millicurie’s I Want to Believe (nerd wars), LadyKatka’s Hagrid Illusion, and drdomestiKated’s 10 toward ∞ (nerd wars). Happy anniversary drdomestiKated!

Above: WonderWhyGal’s Where the Lilacs Bloom, baroquepurls’ Shocking orange shawl (nerd wars) and AlterLace’s Hedgehog Clutch (nerd wars).

Above: roben’s Robin! Girl Wonder! (nerd wars), PixelBamf’s Pillage Before You Burn!, and winemakerssister’s One Does Not Simply…. (nerd wars)

There are many ways to search Ravelry groups, but searching by location can be useful if you are new in town, looking for people near you or if you are traveling and trying to find out more about the yarn situation at your destination.

Since many groups cover an area that is larger than a single town or city, the location search has a few extra smarts. Searching by location will also turn up groups with members that are concentrated (according to profiles) around that region.

You can find this search on the groups tab: browse groups by location (also try choosing “only local stitch ‘n bitch groups” after searching)

(in this example, the Churchmouse group is really big, really active, and full of Seattleites so it comes up first)

Local groups can be pretty quiet compared to those that revolve around topic. You might even consider adding your local groups to your forums in case someone who is new to town comes by with a question.

Bonus: sort of on the subject of local stuff, if you like the Hot Right Now section of the patterns tab, take a look at this Hot Around the World page. It’s just something that I’m playing with and it’s not connected to anything, but it is updates throughout the day
and it’s kind of neat.

The Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup ended their spring semester on March 31st. These are just a few of the 2000(!!) projects that students posted in the March class threads.

To find out more about what goes on in the House Cup group, take a look at this this nifty slideshow.

Pictured above, from left to right: MrsDanvers’ Arithmancy Mandrake, simplyme5252’s Riddari cardi, and Jayannell’s Rose and Thorn Cardigan.

AnnieCC’s Charon, TheWindWraith’s Rams & Yowes….and a Collie too, and Marushka’s Summer Splendor.

kirsts’ V’s Easter basket, LarcYarn’s Cruciatus Wellwood, and frimptes’ spring roses.

If you blog about your projects or yarn, you can connect those blog posts to the related pages in your Ravelry notebook. If you’d like to do this, just add your blog URL to your profile and visit the “blog posts” tab on any of your projects, yarn, fiber, or spinning projects to make the connections.

If you have many notebook pages that you’d like to connect to blog posts, you can save time and update many at once by using the link that is shown in your profile (highlighted below)