KDO Part 1 - Sock Party

Whew, Knitters' Day Out is over! I have much to share. I plan to report in three parts, one for each class I took and another for the market.

My Friday evening class was called "Sock Party," taught by Carol Breitner. The class structure included many party elements. First, we had an icebreaker mixer activity called "Find a knitter who..." We had to find classmates who had Second Sock Syndrome, hate/love Kitchener, have a sock knitting blog, knits socks 2-at-a-time, etc. It was a fun way to get to know our classmates quickly. There were only 9 of us, so this didn't take long.

Here is the instructor, Carol Breitner (check out her sock earrings, Los Lobe Hose - she designed them). She is in the final stages of writing and self-publishing a book titled The Great Sock Divide: Knitting Socks That Fit. She expects it to be published early next year. She is one of the knitting book authors who has been participating in Cat Bordhi's "Visionary Retreat" called "Self-Publishing for Knit Designers." If you haven't heard about it, you can listen to Cat explain all about it in episode 84 of the CraftSanity podcast. Anyway, here's Carol:Because it was a party, we played a few games... like sock toss (photo below), speed cast-on, and team knitting (one person holds each needle). Fun!

We spent quite a bit of the class time sharing information and showing various socks we had knit. Most people have a specific way they prefer to make socks (needle preference or top-down/top-up), but a couple were multilingual sock knitters. Carol brought this nifty socktopus that holds a lot of socks at once.We talked about our favorite books and ended the evening with hand stretches. I definitely need to start doing more of those!

We even left with a party favor including some chocolate, the all-important emery board, and handy instructions for a provisional cast-on with ravel cord written by Carol.

It was a fun evening!