Sock Summit -- Experience of a Lifetime

photo courtesy of Deb Accuardi

I am not going to do an overall recall of my entire Sock Summit experience. That's why this is so late in coming! There's too much to say and so many feelings about the whole thing. As many of you already know, I spent 3 days doing registration. I have NO regrets about that. It was a wonderful way to meet my sock buds and celebrities alike.

The part of my weekend that was really unexpected is that I was asked to assist a teacher on Saturday afternoon. I didn't know who she was, or what her work was like. I was just looking forward to helping a teacher in any way that I could and get to be a fly on the way of her class.
The teacher that I was assigned to was Marjan Hammick, aka yarnissima. Traveling all the way from her small village in The Netherlands, her tales of rural life and growing up in a knitting culture were fascinating to me.

I'm generally pretty clear about what I find to be "fun" to know socks, and um...NOT. If I had time to examine Marjan's work in advance, I might have been more guarded about the class. What happened instead is that I saw her patterns and was called to the challenge. Marjan's design's caress the foot in the most amazing ways, bringing in traditional twisted, Bavarian stitches to truly fluid and inspired designs.

That Saturday night I went home and immediately cast on the most simple socks "Brainless" using techniques that I was not so very familiar with. A week later I had the socks complete and any worries I had about fit cleared up in the relaxing of the yarn in the first wash. The only thing that I did differently was to work the whole upper leg in stockinette, as it seemed in the pattern to be optional. Probably not, but moving up a needle size, it worked just perfectly for me and it added to the elegance of the design.

Yesterday I cast-on her latest design, Sottopassaggio.

Although better pictures of all of these socks exist elsewhere, these are my pictures of the same socks when I got to actually feel and examine their textures and construction. These were taken my my moment of glee!


Look at that calf detail!
And finally, below is my "brainless" using yarn from Miss Babs.
And for those of you who know me, I always make time to knit, right? Sweaters are just going to have to wait until I get a little of this out of my system!