Sock it to me!

Sock It to Me:
Competitive Knitters
Get Deadly Serious
Based on 'Assassin' Game,
This Contest Has Players
On Pins and Needles
By KEVIN J. DELANEY
December 17, 2007; Page A1

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

The socks did it.


Sock Wars is a test of skills, luck and endurance that participants bill as the "bloodiest extreme knitting tournament ever." Kevin Delaney reports.
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.

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