Ravelry Tips and Tricks

This is the second in an occasional series of blog postings about some of our favorite Ravelry features.

If you look in your Ravelry notebook, you'll see a link for your personal Ravelry library. The library offers separate tabs for Books, Pamphlets, Magazines and PDFs that you own. Since the publishers of magazines, books, pamphlets have already put their publications into Ravelry, all you need to do is find them and say "I own this." (Not all publications are in Ravelry, especially older books and pamphlets, but a lot are. Try it and see for yourself!) Click on the "Add book" button in the book tab to search by title or author. When your book comes up you click on the link to add it to your personal bookshelf.

A nice thing about putting publications into your library is not only that you can keep track of all pattern books, etc., that you own, but you can also search for individual patterns within these publications. The search can limited to a single publication, for example Ravelry displays 33 patterns that appeared in Vogue Knitting Spring/Summer 2010. Or, you can expand your search to look in all books (or magazines, pamphlets, etc.) that you own, or to search everything in your library --including single PDF patterns!

Do you ever think "I know I have a pattern for a beaded scarf somewhere" but despair of finding it in your stack of patterns and pattern books? Ravelry's Library feature can help!