WAYWO - Extreme KNITTING? 1/6/08

Okay, I knit. I know many of you WAYWO'ers do, too. But I never considered knitting to be an extreme sport.

Enter Sock Wars.

Sock Wars is a twist on the game Assassin, whose other variations require participants to shoot assigned target players with water pistols or Nerf weapons or tag them with spoons. Such games are played a lot on college campuses.

Julie Gardner, a freelance TV and film production manager near Belfast, Northern Ireland, got the idea for Sock Wars last year after hearing a radio report on StreetWars, an urban Assassin-style tournament involving water guns. Gardner, 31, was planning a follow-up to an online knitting contest she had run and immediately was drawn to the idea of pitting knitters against one another like assassins locked in mortal combat.

No, the players aren't challenging each other with knitting needles - at least, not the way you think.

Here's how it works:

The founder, Julie Gardner, writes a sock pattern. All participants supply their names, addresses, and shoe size. Gardner matches each participant to a target, and gives the name, address, and shoe size of the target.

Then, you knit. Fast fast fast, knit a pair of socks to fit your target, using Gardner's pattern. When you're finished, send your finished socks to your target.

How do you die? You receive a pair of socks, usually in the mail. If you're not finished your target's socks, you send them to your killer, who tries to finish them before being "offed".

Donaldson, 58, was just a few minutes from finishing a pair of socks for her target, Kathy Doughty, when, on Oct. 24, she picked up at the post office the package with the socks that did her in. Donaldson, a retiree, then packaged up the socks she was working on for Doughty and shipped them off to her assassin. Doughty still hasn't received them and calculates the nearly completed socks destined for her had been held by nine different participants, with each of them dying before they could finish their knitting.

What fun! I'm knitting my very first sock as we speak - just finished turning the heel, in fact. Maybe I'll join Sock Wars next time around ...