My Side of the Story...

I wasn't sure I was going to do this, but after multiple emails and phone calls asking, "Where did you go?", I decided it was time to address this. But just this one time...

For all its wonder and elegance, the Internet can be a nasty place. People are able to pretend to be someone or something they're not, behave in ways they would never behave in the company of real people, or say things under the cloak of anonymity that they would never think to utter in front of their mom or dad. For me, it's a simple thing. Either a person has integrity or they don't. What does that mean? Integrity is how a person behaves even if they're positive they'll never get caught. I am a person of integrity. Pure and simple. It governs my daily life and my behavior, online or off. It's who I am - right down to the core. Put it on my headstone if you want..."Here lies a Woman of Integrity".

I, too, am a former member of Ravelry. I've been "forbidden" to access the site anymore by the owners of the site. Why? Well, I can honestly tell you I have no idea. No, really! I have no idea. It's been "reported" that it was because of unacceptable behavior on their site. Hmmm, my posts are all still there. If you're a member, please go read my words, which have been saved for posterity. I was never unkind, rude, nasty, obnoxious, or God-forbid, "vile" as some have said of all the nearly 200 people who were tossed off the site.

Here's the truth. For me, there was life before Ravelry, and there will be life after Ravelry. What I'll miss is the daily dose of like-minded, creative women whose lives I shared on Grandma's Hand, Sage Wisdom and Sew Obsessed...all groups on Ravelry. We never discussed politics. We talked about family, our crafts and our lives. We had so much more in common than we had differences.

When I raised a call for handcrafted pet mats for the unhomed pets at our local Suncoast Humane Society, I received crocheted and knitted mats from all over the country from members of Sage Wisdom and Grandma's Hand. I was honored to present them to the staff at the shelter, who were grateful for the heart and hard work that had gone into each and every mat. I know for a fact that the animals have appreciated them during our unusually cold Florida winter this year!

There are also wonderful women I met, in person, as a result of my membership in Ravelry. One day, early in my membership, I received a private message from a gal named Netta (I revised this to remove her Rav name) who told me she lived just down the road from me in the next town. She invited me to meet her for knitting night at the local Books-a-Million store and introduced me to more beautiful women that I'm now happy to call my friends. Through her, I also met and befriended many more creative women in a local Project Linus group.



I still have my local Ravelry friends and for that I'm very grateful. What I've lost is the daily contact with the "Grandmas" and the unique perspectives on family that we share; those wise women over at Sage Wisdom, who gave my mind a daily exercise; and the talented and beautiful minds creating equally beautiful things in Sew Obsessed. To think that any of them might believe me to be capable of the awful things being written about the "Forbidden 200" pains me greatly. I only hope that the few who come here and read this will go back to the many who still reside in those groups and ask them to come and visit me here.