Sock War
My parents drove down to Huntsville over Labor Day weekend to visit me. Last time they were here was early May when they came down for my birthday, and they weren’t able to come back for a while after that due to my mom having knee surgery at the beginning of June. She’s up and around now and moving better than ever. When we went out for a walk on Saturday she was able to go about three or four times as far as she used to be able to before we had to stop and rest, and even then we were stopping because it was hot out and she just wanted to cool off as opposed to stopping because her knee hurt. So, she’s making an awesome recovery.
Saturday night she was sitting on the futon next to me talking about knitting socks, when she pulled out a book that one of her friends had gotten her. It was Knitting More Circles Around Socks, the sequel to Knitting Circles Around Socks (which I currently own), by Antje Gillingham. I enjoy knitting socks in part because I think that they’re really easy to knit despite popular belief that you need to use two magic wands instead of needles for it to come out looking anything like a sock.
I’ve always been intrigued by the Circles Around Socks method of using two circular needles to knit both socks at the same time. It seemed to me to be a very efficient way of getting your socks done with the same number of rows, the same size, and at the same time. As I was looking through my mom’s book I saw a pair of slip-stitch socks that I really wanted to try, and so my mom challenged me to a sock war.
The way that sock wars normally work in the knitting world is that everybody involved in the war gets an address, shoe size, and sock pattern. It’s a race to get your pair of socks knit and mailed off to your target before another knitter does the same thing to you. If you get a pair of socks in the mail, then you’re dead and out of the game. At that point you wrap up the socks you were knitting and send them to your killer, who has to complete them and mail them off before getting killed themselves. It’s a silly little game, but sounds like a ton of fun.
The sock war with my mom is a little different. Next time I see my mom, if one of us doesn’t have her socks done, then she’ll have to take 2 skeins of the winner’s sock yarn. So, it’s not really a war by any stretch of the imagination and more like yet another attempt for my mom to dish off some of her yarn. Still, at the end of it at least I’ll either have more sock yarn or a pair of socks. So really I win either way.
Leave a Comment