It is possible...
Categories: knitting
Tags: knitting
Date: 02 November 2010 11:11:28
... that the sock knitting may be getting out of hand.
Do you remember a while back I wrote about Sock Wars? That was my first foray into competitive knitting. It was fun. Now, a sock takes me about 13 hours of solid knitting (more if it is complicated or if there is something interesting on tv). A pair of socks is therefore more than a day in a perfect world where no sleep or breaks for food, family or work were needed. Funnily enough, I don't live in that world. I think that with Sock Wars I achieved a personal best of a pair of socks in three days, but I had cleared a lot of things off the schedule in order for that to happen.
There was another competition running at the same time as Sock Wars. It is called Iron Knitter. Six rounds of sock knitting, against the clock and against other people. In this competition, you get to keep the socks, rather than posting them around the world. Well, back in January I thought this was well beyond me so I kept out of it. Something changed, however, when I saw that the second Iron Knitter was starting in September, so I signed up.
For each round a puzzle is posted that you (and your team - up to four other people) have to solve before you receive the knitting pattern. Then the knitting begins. There is a specific deadline to meet (usually about 2 weeks after the puzzle is released) and a certain percentage of competitors that go through to the next round.
These are my socks from round 1
It was a fairly simple pattern. The wool is from The Knitting Goddess and was a birthday present from my lovely sister-in-law. I started them on the 2nd of September and finished on the 12th, taking in a trip to Northumberland with Mr F and Rusk and having 5 days to spare before the deadline.
The socks bring me one step closer to being able to match my socks to the liturgical colour of the day (no - I don't know why this is something to aim for). I may need to do a few more purple socks to cover the whole of Advent and Lent, although I can probably manage the Sundays with these.
Anyway, that was round 1. I am currently knitting the socks for round 4, so there is much more to come.