Sock Wars: footwear + assassin = a lot of fun (I guess)

From Kevin Delaney in the WSJ, an interesting and funny article on competitive sewing...

Meryl Williams's friends had been asking her for days, "Are you dead yet?" On Oct. 30, she suddenly was.

The socks did it.

Ms. Williams, 52 years old, was done in by a small package bearing an unfamiliar return address. When she saw it in her mailbox, she knew she had met her maker. Inside was a pair of black and orange socks, just her size.

In recent weeks, about 150 people around the world have received similar notices of their demise. They were all participants in Sock Wars, billed by its organizer as the "bloodiest extreme knitting tournament."

Sock Wars requires each participant to knit a pair of socks for another player and ship them off to the target. Players are eliminated from the contest -- or "killed" -- when, like Ms. Williams, they receive the socks. Once they receive their socks, participants have to ship to their assassins the pair they were still working on for their own targets. The assassins then must finish those socks and send them along, hoping that they don't first receive their own killer socks from another assassin. The last assassin standing -- or sitting -- wins.

Participants say Sock Wars brings out bloodthirsty instincts in the knitting community and sets hearts pounding each time these women (and a few men) check the mail. When the fateful package comes, "you stand there as if you really were dead," says Ms. Williams, a chef in Cape May, N.J.

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 free-lance 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. Ms. 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. "The whole 'knitting is the new yoga' cliché had been irritating a good few of us," says Ms. Gardner. "I wanted a wicked edge to it."

The first edition of Sock Wars, held last year, attracted more than 800 participants and spawned at least one imitator: Death by Socks. Participants in this year's contest, which began Oct. 13, hail from around the world, including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and Finland....

Other online events include the Sockapalooza handknit sock exchange, the Socktoberfest sock-knitting festival and the Knitting Olympics, which awarded virtual gold medals that participants could display on their blogs if they started and completed a knitting project during the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Socks are a favorite for knitting events because they're portable, possible for beginners and veteran knitters alike and don't require a lot of expensive yarn.

At the beginning of Sock Wars, Ms. Gardner provides each player with the name, address and shoe size of a target. She also designs an original pattern everyone has to follow. Ms. Gardner called the one last year "the International Sock of Doom." This year's pattern is "Scar," and has a ridge down the side meant to resemble one. Participants are free to add their own flourishes. One knitted the words "Sock Wars" on one heel and a skull and crossbones on the other.

They've also devoted a lot of energy to the delivery of the socks, packaging them with flowers and cheeky notes. Linda Cameron of Hamilton, N.D., says her assassin enclosed a sympathy card and a package of corn chowder mix.

One male knitter's assassin hand-delivered his socks last year. About six men participated in the contest this year. One of them, Uvon Tucker of Chicago, received pink socks. "A little disheartening since I'm a guy," says Mr. Tucker, a marketing assistant at a retirement community. Some postulate that men, whose feet tend to be bigger, have a slight advantage in Sock Wars because larger socks can take longer to knit.

Participants post photos of the completed socks online, with some dramatizing their assassination using fake blood or by lying on the floor beneath the pair they received. After her Sock Wars death, Heidi Imbody of Boyertown, Pa., posted a poem to the Yahoo Groups site used to coordinate the contest. It begins: "Here she lies brokenhearted. / She had one sock complete, / and the second one started."...

As of Dec. 1, there were 12 knitters still standing in Sock Wars II.