Gold Medal in Knitting

The medal has arrived! Congratulations to everyone that participated. It has been a lot of fun looking at all the individual accomplishments that are being posted.

It's amazing to think of all the knitting that was started and completed around the world in 16 days. How much yarn that would be? I used only skein of sock yarn, but there were over 4,000 participants. I wonder what distance that yarn would stretch! Maybe next year there will be a statistician and someone to keep all kinds of records. Training could become a year round activity.

This challenge really was a lot of fun and did get me over the "sock block". I finally finished a pair and now I'm hooked. I'm trying to use up stash yarn for all my knitting this year. I made a promise at the start of the year to myself not buy any new yarn until I had used up a good potion of my stash. (I did however, make a nice stash enhancement before the promise - I'm not insane.) So new yarn to feed the new habit is out. I am going to order the sock book as a compromise though. After all, that wouldn't be cheating, it isn't yarn. And it will help the cause, I'll be knitting from the stash.

But the book will help with the fascination of it all. Maybe this is because this is the first really "fitted" garment I've made for myself. , But sock knitting has caught my interest in a completely different way than any other knitting has yet . I'm actually interested in the different construction methods for all the individual sock parts. I want to actually try different techniques. Toe up, cuff down, two socks on two needles... The possibilities seem endless. For the first time, I am really interested in the whole process. Usually I'm more interested in the finished product.

I've really just the knitting equivalent to a button monkey from the office. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I certainly will still continue to knit projects where the only goal is to finish the darn thing. I have also even learned techniques to get something done. But this is something I'm actually going to figure out. I've even started looking at different stitch patterns trying to come up with something for my own sock pattern. Hmm.....I wonder if anyone wrote their first knitting pattern for the 2006 games... There is always next year.