Twist Collective Blog

A Knitter's Guide to Polyvore

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Published on Wednesday, 05 May 2010 02:23

by Marnie MacLean, from a series of original posts in the Ravelry Twist Collective forum.

If you read the Twist Collective Blog regularly, you've seen the Style Notebook posts where Julia uses a site called Polyvore to suggest styling options for the many beautiful patterns Twist offers. I've gotten sucked into the fun and will be offering posts on my blog ways you might work some of my designs into your own wardrobe (if you happen to share my weird sense of style). I absolutely love the way Julia and Kate style my pieces for the magazine, but I also think it's really fun to see pieces in another context. Here's how I play with Polyvore, and now you can too. I’ll say that I found Polyvore a little hard to use at first, a little unintuitive, but once you get it, it’s fun.

For the graphics I used (and you can yank anything I’ve used, from my sets and re-use them if you like), I used photoshop to clear out the backgrounds and then I saved them to the web using a program called Skitch. I don’t know what to suggest if you use a PC, but, as mentioned, Flickr is no good. You can just grab photos from Twist, but Polyvore does a subpar job of clearing out the background, IMHO.
Probably the easiest way to get started, once you’ve made your account, is to go into someone else’s set and look at the individual items listed down the side. Click on the one you want to use and click “Be The first…”


Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

For people who want to know how to clip a new image to polyvore, here’s a very simple walk-through.

Step A:

Go to the bottom of any Polyvore page and choose “Clipper.” Drag the “Clip to Polyvore” text to your toolbar simply using your mouse to do so.

Step B:

Navigate to an image you want to clip. You cannot clip anything from Flickr. You can use items you’ve personally loaded into Ravelry or your blog. Click the Polyvore bookmark and a box will appear

Step C:

Click on an image you want to clip. Note that in Ravelry, the thumbnail will pop up into a larger image and you will have to click that so it’s 2 clicks in Ravelry, 1 click in most other places.

Step D:

Click as many images as you like and add names and tags.

>

Step E:

Go back to Polyvore and admire your handywork!

Proceed with abandon!

To see the outfits that Marnie has imagined for her own Twist designs, visit her blog.  To see reader-submitted polyvore ideas, stay tuned here to the blog.