Berroco Knit-alongs: How to Use Ravelry Forums for Posting

I’m one of the many, many people in love with Ravelry and all the great things that the small team operating a large website have done to make craft time even better. Sadly, the Ravelry team has not yet figured out a way to make all your ends weave in on their own, but give them a few years. 😉 What the team there has done is pretty amazing though. Ravelry is: a one-stop shop for pattern inspiration, shopping, and storage; an incredible source for yarn information (with links to online retailers of said yarn when available); a digital project notebook for all your knitting, crochet, spinning, and machine knitting projects; and a way to gather with fellow crafters all over the world—and all of this is absolutely free! We’ll be talking about one of these features today as part of our discussion how to use Ravelry as part of a Berroco knit-along experience.

In a recent post, I talked about how to find the Berroco Lovers group on Ravelry, join the group, and find the knit-along thread. Don’t forget, you’ll need to create a free Ravelry account to join the group.

Just a heads up, all of the photos here are from a desktop computer—if you’re using a mobile device, you should have all the same functionality, it just may be in a slightly different place.

Once you’re in the thread, if you haven’t read any of it before, you’ll start at the first post. You’ll see the header at the top (the photo of Marsh and Mallow for the Marsh + Mallow Knit-along, in this case), where we’ll keep quick reference data, such as the patterns, yarns, and start dates for the knit-along. This information will be at the top of each page in the thread, so you can always find it easily.

You’ll also notice there are some text and links above the header image: a number of posts, a number of images, a number of patterns, and more. That gives you a break down of the posts in the thread, the number of images included in each thread, the number of patterns mentioned in each thread, etc. You don’t need to do anything with that information, it’s just helpful to know and can be fun to explore, so try clicking those links some day!

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see navigation links that look like this.

Clicking “Forums” takes you to the main forums page, where you can see the discussion threads for all of your groups. “Index” takes you to the list of threads for the Berroco Lovers group. “Top” takes you to the top of the page that you’re currently viewing. “Next Unread” takes you to the next unread thread of posts within the Berroco Lovers Group. The text in the middle of the navigation bar tells you which thread you’re currently reading (just in case you get caught up in the discussion and forget). The “Reply to Thread” button in the right hand corner is one of the two buttons you really need to know for this.

When you click “Reply to Thread”, a brand new text box opens up.

Once the text box is open, just start typing your message. If you’re new to the group, you can simply introduce yourself and let us know which project you’re using for the knit-along.

Then click the “Post Reply” button below the text box, and your reply will be added to the thread!

If you want to reply to someone else’s post within the thread, you can click the “Reply” button in the bottom right corner of their post (you won’t be able to “edit” or “Delete” posts that aren’t yours—I just have that option because I’m a moderator of the group).

You’ll get a text box below another box that easily allows you to see the post to which you are responding.

If you wanted to reply to the thread instead of to an individual post, hit the “reply to thread” button at the top of the green box. Otherwise just type your message and hit “post reply”.

Your new post will show up!

And that’s the basics of using the Ravelry discussion groups to chat in one of our knit-alongs! Feel free to come over to the Berroco Lovers group and practice posting.