2,000,000

Those of you who know me personally know that I have a great many soap boxes. I try to be judicious in my hopping up and ranting, and remember that it’s important to pick my battles. While I know I’m preaching to the choir here, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that there were 2,000,000 people registered as Ravelry users on February 29, 2012. Ravelry, for the unintiated, is a social networking site for knitters and crocheters. It’s not much use if you don’t do either of these things, but if you do, it’s pretty awesome. To start with, there are 1,999,999 other crafters posting cool things to look at. But the point of this post was not to extol the virtues of this particular knitting-related resource; it was, instead, to remind the world that there are prodigious numbers of knitters (and crocheters) out there in the world and slowly but surely we are all realizing that we are not alone. A quick google search revealed that 2,000,000 is approximately equal to the population of the city of Houston in 2010, and higher than the population of Philadelphia in the same year. Imagine that a major US city was emptied – it could be completely refilled with knitters and crocheters. So next time someone near you, jokes that he or she saw a knitter on the latest rendition of “Girls Gone Mild” remind him or her that, first of all, boys knit too, and second of all, that we are not mild and will poke you with sharp sticks. Happy 2,000,000th, Ravelry!