Pinning and winning

You know how it is: you're looking round the web, and you find a picture of the perfect lace edging (or garden bench, or veneer effect), and only later realise that you should have noted it down. But you didn't. Oh dear. Did you know there's a place on the web where you can put all those little bits of information? It's called Pinterest. It's mostly used for squirrelling images away, but you can also store any sort of information that comes associated with an image. When you click on an image stored on Pinterest, you're brought immediately to the website where the image appeared to start with. This means that if you find, say, an ideal crème brûlée recipe with a picture attached, and you pin the picture, clicking on it later will whisk you straight to the recipe. (Just as if you were using a noticeboard on your wall, storing an image is called "pinning".) And then it's roll on with the eggs, the cream and the blowtorch. Pinterest has enormous usefulness for knitting, crochet and crafts in general. You can store references to techniques, patterns, design ideas and so on, and then find them with a mouseclick. You can also browse through what your friends are pinning and get inspired that way. (If you're curious, here's what people have pinned from this very site.) Organising your pins by category makes them easier to browse - here's a bit of a board devoted to photography... ...but your categories could be anything at all that's useful to you. There's a little bit of code that you can download to make pinning even easier. It's called a "Pin It" bookmarklet, and it puts a little button on your browser toolbar. When you come across something you'd like to pin, just click on the button and it does the rest for you. You'll find information about it under the "About" tab at the top of any Pinterest page. And while we're on the topic of useful buttons, Ravelry has one too. If you click on the Patterns tab and then scroll all the way down the page, you'll find a link for getting a "Ravel It" bookmarklet. Then, when you see a lovely crocheted or knitted pattern online, just click on the button and as if by magic, you'll be brought to the Ravelry page for the pattern (if it has one, but then, over two hundred thousand patterns do). And we're very happy to announce that we have a winner to our product review draw! Gillian, who's Poppylillious on Ravelry, won with her review of Blue Sky Alpaca Silk. Congratulations, Gillian - we'll be in touch about getting your goodie bag to you (it's got a skein of each of our newest yarn ranges in it - Shetland 2ply, MillaMia Merino Soft, Petra Crochet Cotton and "Powerscourt", our exclusive shade of Hedgehog Fibres Sock yarn). Your reviews are useful to everyone that visits the site, and they help us more than you could imagine. You're helping us build a resource for crocheters and knitters all over the world, so thank you all. We couldn't do this without you. PS: Did you see we were shortlisted in the "Best Blog of a Business" category of the Bord Gais Social Media Awards? We're delighted!