[Nfb-krafters-korner] ravelry announces separate category for loom knit patterns

[Cathy]

hi all loomers,
I am posting this from another list for  the loom knitters here and the interest in ravelry.
I have been one who has been wishing that ravelry would allow one to search for patterns by loom knit specifically and now you can! here are more details.

Cathy

Today it is official - loom knitting is real knitting.

The back story:
For the past few months, the loom knitting patterns at Ravelry (over 800 of them) have been under a cloud. Ravelry had made a category for machine knit projects, (not patterns), but refused to do the same for loom knit projects or patterns, claiming that loom knitting was not real knitting. When pressed, Ravelry even said that loom knit patterns should not be added to the database, and those already in the database would be "tolerated" for now, but could be removed in the future. 

This made us very sad.

This morning, after pressure from the machine knitters to make an official category for machine knit patterns, Ravelry reversed themselves, and, as an after thought, they added a category for loom knit patterns, too. 

We are real knitters, and we have a real pattern database.

Well, almost. 

All the patterns already in Ravelry, all 800, need to be edited and the craft designation changed from "knitting" to "loom knitting". The designers who entered their patterns at Ravelry have to do this themselves. If someone else put the pattern on Ravelry, it can be edited without the designer. You can look at the patterns, and there will be a little yellow pencil icon at the top of the page. If the pencil is grey, you can not edit the pattern. If the pencil is yellow, you click on it an change the craft category to "loom knitting". 

When you go to the advanced pattern search page, you'll now see "loom knitting" followed by a number - the number of patterns in the database. Last check it was 83, so we have almost 700 more to change over. 



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