It’s my birthday, and I’m celebrating by taking the day off, treating myself to some cake, and…writing about how terribly Ravelry has mishandled (and continues to mishandle) their new website interface.

This post has been a while coming, but now that I have some time to sit down and think (and, because Ravelry has continued to ignore the problem and have now escalated to gaslighting users and lying about people who have spoken up about this) I’m collecting my thoughts.

First: I know there’s a lot of other stuff going on. We’re still in a pandemic, we’re still fighting for Black lives, we’re still protesting injustice and trying to stop our country from becoming a fascist state. These have not gone away, and I have not forgotten about them.

I learned how to knit several times before it stuck. I learned in middle school, and was such a tight knitter my mom gave up because I couldn’t even get the stitches off the needle. I learned again in high school, knitting these absurd scarves out of one color yarn held with a different color of fun fur, and luckily since these were knit on size 17s or so I did a little better with the tension. I learned again after college, when a friend decided to knit a Ravenclaw scarf and I decided I wanted to knit one too.

And then, I had just moved to Boston and my mom and aunt came out to visit, and we drove down the cape to Provincetown and on the way back stopped at a yarn store on a whim. I found some yarn I liked (it had sparkles in it), and had many beginner-questions for the shopkeeper like “If I want to make it this wide how much yarn should I buy?” and “what needles should I use?”. She said “have you heard about Ravelry?” and wrote the website down for me on a piece of paper, and a couple days later I remembered that she’d mentioned this mystery website and signed up for an account.

And that was that. Since 2011, Ravelry has been one of the most regular sites I use. It’s got yarn, it’s got patterns, it’s got fancy math behind the scenes, it’s got one of my favorite faceted searches ever (yes I am a nerd), and it had people I could go to for help with anything knitting or yarn-related. I found new yarns on Ravelry. I found new designers on Ravelry. I participated in KALs on Ravelry. I got testers for my knitting designs on Ravelry. I bought almost every knitting pattern I’ve ever used on Ravelry. I told everyone I knew who crafted that Ravelry was the best thing out there for knitters and crocheters.

And now, I can’t use Ravelry (and I’m far from the only one), and Ravelry…doesn’t care. It’s been a month, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Ravelry is not going to fix this problem, that Ravelry doesn’t believe its users when they say this new website is harming them, that Ravelry is going to deny that anything is happening at all. That instead of saying “we’re sorry, we’ll switch back to the old site so that we don’t give people seizures and headaches anymore, did we mention we’re sorry”, they’re buckling down, giving us all the middle finger, and cutting off any way to get in touch with them so that they don’t have to admit they made a mistake.

I think it’s accurate to say that I’m heartbroken about this. I thought Ravelry was here for us. I thought Ravelry was an inclusive website. I thought Ravelry cared about their users. Obviously I was wrong. So, I’m not using Ravelry anymore. I’m supporting projects like fiber.club, who will actually listen to what users need, and I’m moving my entire knitting project and yarn database to Airtable.

A screenshot of the “Knitting Makes” tab in Jane’s Airtable, showing columns for project name, picture, pattern used, yarn used, and notes.

If you know me, it’s no secret that I love Airtable. I use it for everything I possibly can — tracking the books I read, keeping an eye on my expenses, storing info about my wardrobe and outfits — so it isn’t too surprising that I’ve moved all my crafting data there too. I’d been thinking for a while about learning how to API so that I could get my knitting projects from Ravelry and my sewing & quilting projects from Textillia (which I have absolutely not kept up with) all in the same place and have a more comprehensive view of what I make, how long it takes me, and what else I worked on at the same time. If I’m not using Ravelry anymore, I don’t really need to learn how to connect it to an API now, do I.

A screenshot of the gallery view on the “Knitting Makes “ tab of Jane’s Airtable, which highlights the photos in the record and also shows the project name.

If you don’t know anything about Airtable, the easiest way I’ve found to describe it is either “it’s like Excel on steroids” or “it’s a baby relational database”, depending on how you like to think about things. I’ve set mine up with different sections for sewing/cross-stitching/quilting (“things I do with needles and fabric and thread”), knitting/crocheting (“things I do with yarn”), and spinning (which does turn in to yarn but is itself different from a knitting project). Then, I’ve pulled everything into one combined table so I can see that comprehensive overview while still being able to track different craft-specific information and materials used.

A screenshot of the Gallery view on the “Combined” tab of Jane’s Airtable, showing knitting, sewing, and cross-stitch projects together.

I’m still working on putting all of the information I want into this Airtable (I’m adding needles and pattern information next), and I still haven’t decided how much of this I want to make public-public. I also think I’ll make another post that goes more in-depth on which pieces connect to each other, but if you’re interested in trying this out for yourself or poking around Airtable, I made a template and published it on Airtable Universe so that you can copy a shell of what I did and fill in your own information.

One thing I can’t re-create is the links to other projects, the extensive pattern search, the yarn database, and the community. That’ll have to wait for fiber.club.