Sometimes it’s hard to hate Katherine Heigl. Of course, it should be easy—the Grey’s Anatomy actress has made a practice out of doing things that almost seemed designed to make her fans turn against her (withdrawing her name from Emmy competition because she felt she was not given awards-worthy material from the writers of the show that made her famous, or criticizing Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up—a.k.a. the film that made her a movie star—for painting women as humorless and uptight shrews, etc). But then you see a lightweight summer romantic comedy like The Ugly Truth and one is forced to admit that Ms. Heigl is actually pretty good in such fizzy fare, elevating predictable material into something almost worth watching. Almost.

Ms. Heigl plays Abby, a highly competent television producer that—surprise!—has problems producing much in the way of a love life. This, we are shown, through various scenes of Abby being uptight and controlling (she prints out the profile of her Internet date—hi, Kevin Connolly!—and provides him talking points to get through dinner) and hopelessly sad-sack Cathy-like singlehood existence with every cliché you can think of. (That’s right, she has a cat and likes to knit. Come on, Hollywood. Sigh.) Enter Gerard Butler as Mike, an unapologetic misogynist late-night TV personality who likes to say ridiculous things about men and women (the “ugly truth,” natch), only to get hired on to Abby’s show to improve the ratings. Can anyone guess yet what will happen? So, yes, the two spar and then Mike agrees to help Abby try to date her hot neighbor by getting extensions and dressing sluttier and giving such sage advice as to masturbate more. (I am not making this stuff up—he refers to it as “flicking the bean”!) In fact, if there’s any surprises to be found within The Ugly Truth, it is how filthy and raunchy it gets. But once you get over the pleasant surprise of watching Katherine Heigl say “cock,” it does little to take away from how paint-by-numbers this thing is. It becomes not if these two opposites will get together, but when ... and if there will be rain or a dramatic airport scene involved.

That said, the lead actors deal with what they’ve been given with aplomb. Ms. Heigl has a knack for letting herself look silly, and it actually works to the point where you’ll be embarrassedly laughing at her antics (Legally Blonde director Robert Luketic and screenwriters Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith take the When Harry Met Sally faux orgasm scene to its next step: real orgasm in a public restaurant). Gerard Butler certainly is making some interesting choices these days, from boy-favorite 300 to last year’s P.S. I Love You to Nim’s Island. He’s charismatic enough to make wanting to looking past his tough-guy antics (an ugly fat guy would never get away with it) believable, and when the two finally do make out in an elevator, you truly believe that they desperately want to do it. However, with films like (500) Days of Summer out there, it’s hard to see any new ground being broken. It’s a fluffy enough trifle that if seen under the right circumstance could be fun. Just maybe not if you have a cat and like to knit.

A 26-year-old designer and artist, Mr. Flood—who looks the part of a knitter, with his trim, soft beard, square-framed glasses and uniform of self-created cardigans and sweaters—is also known online as Brooklyn Tweed (his Web site is brooklyntweed.blogspot.com). He’s known in New York knitting circles for his boyish good looks as well as for the simple, fashionable knitting patterns he posts on Ravelry, where he belongs to 59 different groups, from Birkenstock Lovers to Tweed Heads. He devotes a couple hours every morning to answering emails from his fans on Ravelry. He said the site “kicked my ass into gear” into building a career in knitting.

“It’s definitely something that I use as a regular source of inspiration because it’s the fastest way for me to see the most varied source of knitwear, like, without even leaving my computer,” he told The Observer last week over eggs at the Greenpoint Coffee House, located a few blocks from the one-bedroom apartment that he shares with his partner, an opera singer. “There’s lots of things you wouldn’t get to see every day.”

Over the past few years, as more and more New Yorkers like Mr. Flood have developed an obsession with knitting, as fancy yarn stores and “stitch ’n’ bitch” circles have popped up all around us, that old-school pastime has gone online. And Ravelry has become the Internet tool to help the typical needle-wielder navigate through the woolly wild.

“Anybody who is not on Ravelry,” a friend said recently, pausing to lean in—close—“is stupid.” Many users describe Ravelry as a kind of home, one that is uniquely theirs because of the time and energy they put into the site. It doesn’t feel like so many other social networking sites that are run by advertising agencies and work as promotional gimmicks. Rather, Ravelry is a community builder. Mr. Flood said the site is so useful that it has become almost synonymous with knitting: “It’s hard to imagine what [knitting] was like before Ravelry.”

Currently, there are about 275,000 Ravelry users, and there’s a waiting list that is more than 5,000 knitters long. The site works like this: Once users sign in, they can create a profile and start uploading photos of their most recent projects. There’s space to indicate which pattern, yarn and needle size they used—which is useful if other users want to make the same scarf, hat or sweater. They have a “project queue” where knitters can tag and rank patterns that they’d like to work on in the future, and a “favorites” feature, where they can track other users’ progress. Blog posts chronicling their process can be integrated onto personal Web sites. Designers can also create online stores to sell patterns and other projects.

Mr. Flood said Ravelry breaks down the traditional walls built by knitting magazines, in which only published designers were recognized for their work. Ravelry, like almost everything else on the Internet, leveled the playing field.

“What Ravelry has kind of done,” he said, “is spark people to support designers like me and independent people who are working and really know what they’re doing and really love what they are doing, but aren’t necessarily, like, they don’t want to be tied to this publishing, big-business model that they’ve sort of had to deal with.”

RAVELRY'S CREATOR, Jess Forbes, 31, learned knitting from her grandmother while she was growing up in a New Jersey township near Clinton. For years, she had been knitting and blogging at frecklegirl.com before coming up with the idea for Ravelry. Her husband, Casey Forbes, also 31, watched her get frustrated trying to find good information about patterns and yarns on the Internet.

“I’d search for the right pattern to go with the right yarn or needle and knew all the information was out there; I just couldn’t find it in a convenient spot,” Ms. Forbes said. Mr. Forbes had a job as a programmer, and after ruminating on the idea for a few months, sketching logos on bar napkins, they started working on the site in January 2007. By that summer, they had both quit their jobs to work on Ravelry full time—living off donations from users, sales from their online shop and advertising from small knitting and fiber businesses on the site. The Forbeses, who live in Boston, catered a familial image for the site—their googly-eyed Boston Terrier, Bob, serves as the site’s mascot and frequent guest on the company’s blog, titled Where My Stitches At? Ms. Forbes, giving voice to the homey, fuzzy feelings knitting inspires, said that the site’s mission isn’t just to get its users chatting online—they can also make connections in the real world.

“We’re all sitting in front of computers all day and maybe we’re not totally excited about our jobs, and even if we are, maybe we need something different when we get home,” Ms. Forbes said. “We don’t have our traditional communities like we used to. We’re all mobile and we move around a lot and travel—[Ravelry] is a nice way to connect with people when you already have something in common with them.”

There are plenty of groups on the site where crafters can connect and exchange information on message boards and chat rooms. Of course, New York–specific groups have sprouted up, too, like NYC Subway Knitters (800 members) and NYC’s Closeknit Crew (22 members).

“New York is kind of the epicenter of knitting. There’s so many groups, so many shops,” said Jennifer Fox, a 29-year-old dietician and researcher who organizes her Upper East Side Knitters group with Ravelry and Meetup.com. She said Ravelry, is an “instant community of people” that can keep new knitters informed and motivated—online and off.

Ms. Fox’s group is comprised of about 70 members, mostly in their 20s or early 30s and who either live or work on the Upper East Side. About half a dozen of them meet three times a month, sometimes at a members’ apartment for snacks and a tutorial, other times for themed gatherings at coffee shops and public spots. Ms. Fox once organized a trip to girly salon Dashing Diva so members could get pedicures and sip cosmos while they knitted.

Alyssa Pratt, 25, is one of the group’s members. “I don’t think we all would have met without the common bond of knitting,” she wrote in an email. “We don’t sit around and talk knitting. We sit, knit and just talk. I think its the best way to get to know someone new.”

Ms. Pratt also has a fiber shop on Etsy.com, an e-commerce site for crafters, and browses Ravelry for “market research.”

“You might see that a lot of people are dyeing things in purples and blues one month. I take that back to the dye pot and see what I can come up with. Its like my own little focus group,” she explained.

Aryn Morse, a 27-year-old employee at cozy yarn shop Knitty City at 79th Street on the Upper West Side, started a group for the store on Ravelry. “We have an email newsletter, but this is more interactive,” she said. Ms. Morse checks in on the site several times a day. She said customers often come in to the shop with patterns printed out directly from Ravelry’s site and ask for yarns that they heard about from other users.

Knitty City’s owner Pearl Chin said Ravelry has increased her sales, and its users have become her store ambassadors throughout the site, recommending Knitty City in group forums. “We get a lot of out-of-town people who come up and say, I looked you up mainly on Ravelry, rather than Googling or on Yelp.”

“Yarn people are really caring, kind people,” Ms. Chin said, which is probably what makes Ravelry so successful. Much of the site’s content is user-generated, with tons of free tips, step-by-step instructions and patterns uploaded by its users. Dozens of volunteer editors have offered to help the Forbeses maintain the site, and members curate a weekly newsletter as well. The Forbeses created a section of the site called For the Love of Ravelry, where users can make suggestions for new features. Mr. Forbes said they’d like to remove the “beta” label soon, but plan to keep the site free to its users, partially because they already give so much back to the site.

Mr. Flood sees knitting as stitched into the fabric of New York for good, a situation that Ravelry has certainly helped. “It’s kind of filling that need for a tactile experience, which we rarely ever have anymore—especially with the Internet,” he said. “We’re not really touching anything anymore. There’s something about knitting, the everyday-life part that’s integrated into an art form, [that] I think is really unique and meaningful, too. It’s connected to something important.”

Maybe with Ravelry, people can knit their way to whatever that something is.

greagan@observer.com

Until recently, the area remained largely commercial, but lately the last wave of knitting mills in Ridgewood are being converted into mixed-use buildings, spurring a wave of much-needed residential development.

Kalmon Dolgin broker Jean Cook said she has put three former mills on the market this month; the owners cannot afford to convert the buildings into apartments.

“We’re seeing knitters displaced throughout the ([area] who are forced to sell," she said. "I make money either way, but it’s really a drag what’s happening because of NAFTA and free-trade agreements."

Kalmon Dolgin sold a $1.55 million two-story warehouse on Stephen Street to a Manhattan contractor on Monday. The buyer plans to house his wood shop in the 1,000-square-foot ground-floor space and double the building’s height to accomodate a 9,000-square-foot shop and an additional 9,000 square feet of residential apartments, Ms. Cook said.

The firm has also listed a 4,500-square-foot mixed-use building on Hancock Street for $1.3 million and a 2,500-square-foot building for $799,000 on George Street, both of which are owned by knitters.

Theodore Renz, the executive director of the Ridgewood Local Development Corporation, said only a handful of operational knitting mills are left in the neighborhood and the rest are now vacant or occupied by self-storage facilities and carpentry workshops. He said a local university is finishing a study on behalf of the Ridgewood community board to determine the best uses for the industrial buildings bordering Bushwick, but wouldn’t offer more details until it was complete.