Knitting In Public

The day after I got home from the hospital, I had an email reminding me that Sock Madness 2 would begin the next day (Thursday, March 13)! Last year I worked like mad to finish round 1, and barely squeaked in under the wire. The 2nd round I was eliminated as I was paired head-to-head with the person who had finished their round 1 socks first, out of all the competitors! After that, life caught up with me, and I ended up not making any of the other patterns provided for the competition (and it didn’t matter, since I was “out”).

This year, our first pattern is Zombie Socks.

Again, there is a person who finished both socks in less than 24 hours. Huh. I’ll never be that fast.

This pattern, while not difficult, didn’t come intuitively to me at first. It’s also a lot like a ribbed sock, so there’s lots of knit and purl, which sure slows me down. Plus, I’m putting in hours to catch up on work, and have little stamina to knit much per day.

One of our vendors, Laurie, when told that I was “doing better” asked, “yes, but is she knitting yet?” Ah, and there’s the gist of it. I actually went about 10 days without knitting at all!

We were told to choose a “scary” color for our Zombie socks — that left my mind a blank! I finally chose KnitPicks Memories, in the Cape Cod colorway (line and color discontinued, sorry!), and I’m using Brittany size 1 (2.25 mm) needles.

The first sock is done, and I’m on the leg of the 2nd sock. Amazingly, there are still spots open on my team, so I still have hopes of squeaking into round 2. Hopefully that one will go faster for me, or I’m definitely out again. :(  This year, however, they are doing some ’side’ contests on the appearance of the socks, and those contests are open to folks who’ve been eliminated from the original contest (as well as the folks still competing), so there’s some incentive for those who are “out” to continue to knit along with the rest of the competitors. This will help to keep the conversation boards lively, too — last year, as the competition wound down to just a few competitors, a lot of the chatter went away and it just wasn’t as fun so I’m looking forward to this year’s group and competition.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.