Sock Wars

I saw the article about Sock Wars today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

I love to knit socks. I wish I'd known about it before. Players eliminate each other by knitting socks. If you are eliminated you have to mail the unfinished socks you are working on to the person who eliminated you, so that she can finish them off and eliminate another person.

Sock Wars has a Yahoogroup.

While looking for information about Soxk Wars, I came across a knitting blog I like called Yarnivation. I think but am not completely sure that the blog author Julie Gardner is the organizer of Sock Wars. I like the works in progress chart in the side bar. I want something like that.

Sock wars is not to be confused with the other Sock Wars, which is Star Wars acted out by sock puppets.

KnitML

Two people sent me a link to KnitML yesterday.

The KnitML Project's main goal is to develop and promote adoption of a standard content model for knitting patterns. By developing a community-supported specification (KnitML) and providing basic rendering and transformation tools, the KnitML Project aims to make KnitML easy to use and valuable to the knitter.

Old Knitting Books

I recently got this knitting and crocheting book at the Book Mill. It was published in the 1940s.



When I was looking through it, I was struck by how the illustrations for knitting books looked back then. The stuff they showed looked less perfect than the items in my modern knitting books. It looked more like how things really look after you hand knit them. All the pictures were black and white, which nowadays you really would never see. This image of a cute little girl in woolens holding her kitten by its neck was particularly hilarious:



But then I decided to pull out some of my modern knitting books to compare, and I discovered that the photos illustrating some of these are also fairly freaky. This are from Loop de Loop, which I bought mainly because it was on sale. They seem to have been trying to go for some kind of moody arty vibe with their illustrations.

This is the best weird image of the bunch, but there are several others in the book where the adults posing with children seem to be angry, resentful, psychotic, or suicidal.



Just put the child down. Slowly. Slowly.

Jason's Birthday Hat

This is the hat I made for Jason for his birthday. He ripped off the tassle. Looks good with the spikey nubbin.