So I’ve been on Ravelry for almost two weeks now. You know what I find the most addictive?

It is not:

• Abusing the fantastic organizational tools to log all my projects back into stone age and link them to blog posts from stone age.
• Hunting around the project pages for my patterns to see who’s made them and what they look like. Mostly I just like confirming that my pattern directions are understandable and able to be followed by People Who Aren’t Me.
• Stumbling across fabulous new projects that I must knit or I will die. Also, I like finding that someone else has already designed the exact item from my imagination that I wanted to knit. Saves me the trouble of having to design it myself.
• Discovering a surprising fondness for the most Facebook-like tools: friends and groups. It’s been fun to have some of my non-commenting readers “out” themselves. I’ve also enjoyed joining groups for all sorts of knitting and non-knitting esoterica. I actually went a little group-crazy for a while and had to pare myself back down to 11. I love Grey’s Anatomy and all, but I decided that I will stick to talking about it on TV-centric web sites.

There are two things I find addictive, but both boil down to other people stroking my ego:

• Finding my posts have been flagged educational, interesting, or funny. Especially funny.
• Finding that my projects have been favorited. There was a point where I was literally checking Ravelry once an hour to see if I’d gotten any more of those little hearts.

Hi, my name is Yvonne and I have a Ravelry problem.

I’ve just finished the body for the re-knit of my Hourglass Sweater. Let’s check out the fit, shall we?

This is the original Hourglass.

Note the excess fabric around the bustline and the hips. Not to mention the bagginess of the sleeves.

Here’s the way it looks now:

It fits snugly in the bust, smoothly through the waist, and hangs neatly at the hips with no excess. Much better, eh?

Pattern: Bear in Lamb Sleep Suit, by Debbie Bliss, Debbie Bliss: The Baby Knits Book
Yarn: Plymouth Encore, #217 and #1203; Pittsburgh, #9143, oddballs
Needles: Addi Turbos, US 5 (3.75mm) and US 6 (4mm)

I knit this bear for a friend’s new baby. It is so cute that it nearly turned my normally-sensible mother into a woman who would steal teddy bears from small children. Be forewarned.

I love the finished product; the pattern, not so much. There was a thread on Knitter’s Review a while ago asking why toys are so hard to make. I don’t think toys are really hard to make; most of the ones I’ve made are basically lots of tubes with about as much shaping as your average hat. I think a lot of toy patterns are hard to read. And this pattern is a perfect example of the designer making your life unnecessarily difficult.

Take the arms, for example:

From the picture above, you can see that the arms are sort of shaped like lopsided footballs (the American kind). I think most experienced knitters, to make such a shape, would cast on a small number of stitches, join in the round, increase until desired width, work straight for a while, decrease, and then bind off. Or if you want to work flat, omit joining in the round, but do basically the same thing and then seam the sides together.

This is what Debbie Bliss tells you to do:

She has you cast on a small number of stitches, knit a few increase rows, break off the yarn, and make a second piece like that. Then you join the two pieces, knit straight for a while, then you work on half the stitches to shape the point. Then you rejoin more yarn to make the other half of the point. Sew a bunch of seams.

Why on earth would you want to do that? I don’t think it’s particularly beginner-friendly and it creates a bunch of extra ends to darn in.

The way she has you build the foot is even less logical.

Needless to say, once I figured out what the shapes of the finished parts were actually supposed to be, I modified the pattern extensively to save myself some extra work.

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