An Evening with The Big Sock

Okay, so I have to read up a bit more on this whole project, but tonight I took a little road trip out to New Hamburg, and visited a new-ish yarn shop called Shall We Knit. This did a small amount of credit card damage, as I found yet another speckled Koigu colourway I couldn't resist, and some Claudia handpainted laceweight, and I couldn't pass of the surprisingly economical peruvian alpaca sock yarn. More on that later when I load the new stash into Ravelry.

The real reason for my trip out there (yes, it wasn't just stash enhancement!) was this:



That apparent heap of yarn tangle is an attempt to break the world record for the World's Largest Sock. That blog entry is over a year out of date, but the sock has gone on since then. The huge mass of yarn is touring North America and growing rapidly as guilds and shops host knit-nights where all comers can work a few stitches on the sock.

It's a whimsical-seeming project and the point is not obvious, but working on it for a few dozen stitches, the sense of interconnectedness comes out - the end result is not really the point. This is a craft/art project uniting the work of hundreds of knitters the world around. At one point I may have been the only person in the store - it was quiet night and the acquaintance I bumped into had to leave - but I was working on a project with hundreds, maybe thousands, of others. Kind of neat.