This year's instalment (the 10th) of the annual Sock Madness has begun in the knitting world. This is a speed and skill competition, with special patterns commissioned from designers to be used in the various elimination rounds. This is also an added challenge to the advanced knitters because the competition requires that the patterns be knitted as written ... no changes or customizations to stitches or size or technique (so that everybody has to knit the same number of stitches in the same way**); they get to choose their own yarns and colours though.

No, I'm not in this. But it's fun to "watch" and, though often not to my taste, the patterns are always fascinating to see when they are revealed to the general public just because they are always out of the ordinary. This is the just-unveiled first round one sock: SlipStripeSpiral

Edited to add: Just took a look at the numbers. So far only 87 out of 748 competitors have finished these socks (with 5 dropping out of the race)

Further edited to add: If you're curious about just how creative competition socks can be, here are the designs used in the previous nine years of Sock Madness.

**this is why you'll see marker rings or other such oddities on some of the submissions ... they're there as visible indicators to the judges that required number of pattern repeats were completed and aren't actually a permanent part of the socks.

Tags: knitting