Voyager Online

The horrors of the knitting battlefield revealed ...

Every writer I know has a pastime that has nothing to do with writing. I know writers who are amateur astronomers, fiddlers, food sculptors, model train enthusiasts, and jewelers.

So what do I do for fun? I knit. Competitively. Well, not always competitively. Sometimes I just knit for fun, creating things like dice bags that look like dice, biscuit blankets, fingerless gloves, or lip balm cozies in the shape of Cthulhu.

But that’s all pretty tame compared to competitive knitting.

What is competitive knitting? It’s usually a bloody, deadly competition set up on-line between a vast and varied number of knitters. I’ve been involved in a couple different forms of competitive knitting, but let’s talk about the Sock War.

The way this competition was set up, every knitter received the same pattern on the same day. Along with the pattern, you receive your target’s information. (In this case it was shoe size and fiber allergy.) The goal was to knit the sock as fast as you could and then mail the completed pair to your target, “killing” them. Your target, once dead, mails the socks they were knitting (and their target’s information) to you. You now have a new target to kill, and probably a half-finished pair of socks to complete. So you knit on those socks as fast as you can. All the while some other knitter out there has your death on their needles. It is only a matter of time before you too, will be dead.

The last knitter alive receives wonderful prizes.

Sounds like fun? It is. It’s also oddly stressful, and makes going to the mailbox a nerve-wracking experience.

I probably don’t have to tell you that the people drawn to these types of competitions are funny, crazy, and delightful. The Sock War was an international event and attracted over a thousand knitters–men, women, old, young, pros and first time knitters. I managed to stay alive long enough to knit two and a half pairs of socks. Not too shabby since I was also on a tight deadline to finish a book. (Knitting, even competitive knitting, only happens after I get my work done.)

The thing that surprised me about the competition was how many people tried to cheat. I won’t go into details, but let me just say that knitters can play dirty.

Even though I haven’t taken any prizes from competitive knitting yet, I won’t give up. It’s just too much weird fun. So if you’re a knitter, keep your needles sharp and your fingers limber. Because who knows, one day when you find yourself on a bloody, thread-strewn battlefield, I just might be the one coming to kill you.

When not wielding a knitting needle, Devon Monk might be found wielding a pen as she writes the next series of books in the Allie Beckstrom series. In the mean time, Australians will have to be satisfied by reading Magic to the Bone, the first book in the series, which is available across Australia.

You can find the pattern for the Cthulu lipbalm holders on Devon’s livejournal.

Filed under: Author guest blog, Devon Monk, Uncategorized Tagged: | competitive knitting, Devon Monk, knitting, Magic in the Blood, Magic in the Shadows, Magic to the Bone