First "Pet Peeve" of 2010

let me say first that I have been a knitter for about 50 years, since the very first time I was introduced to it by my grandmother

my grandfather worked for the post office back in the 1950s -- in the days when packages and bundles of mail were tied together with white string (remember the line in the song "brown paper packages tied up with string" -- like that!)

anyway, he would bring chunks of that string home in his uniform pants pockets

I can remember helping tie the string together and rolling it into big balls

so, my grandmother taught me to knit with that stuff --- simple things first --- like dish rags made up of rows and rows of just plain knit stitch, the more knots the better because they added to the scrubbing power of the thing

after that I knit for my dolls, and graduated to sweaters and other "big" projects

like I said, I've been doing this a while

so of course, as I've been involved in the blog world, I've read the blogs of fellow knitters and LOVED them --- savoring their pictures, sympathizing with their solving of knitting problems, joining their knitting causes (knitting mittens that go to an Indian reservation for instance)

lately though my ability to "join the group" has been stymied by the fact that I'm not a member of "the group"

a while back someone came up with "Ravelry" and now those folks that are "in" belong to it and post their pictures there

ok, they want to be "exclusive" I guess, but it annoys me mightily that now instead of posting a link from their blogs to someplace that I can see their pictures, they are posting a link to Ravelry

folks, either you want to share with the rest of us or you want to share only with your little "in" group

I wish you wouldn't tease the rest of us lowly mortals