Thursday was our second full day of classes. We started with Cookie A's class on traveling stitches. Interesting. Not enthralling, but a basic primer on where you increase and decrease.
Our second class was with JC Briar, and was awesome: A Cornucopia of Cast-ons! We learned little circle cast-ons (to make center-out thingys) and long-tail cast-on done in PURL and Judy's Magic Cast-on (which finally 'clicked' for me! yay!) and why doing a long-tail cast-on on a larger needle does not fix the unstretchiness of it (it has to do with the part that loops at the base of the stitch, not the part that goes over the needle!) and the German Twisted Cast-on (well, I sort of learned that... it was the last one of the day, and well... I was tired; I don't think that one 'stuck,' but Knitterliness knows it, so when I'm ready, she can teach me!).
Thursday night was... Um. Nice? Fun? I'm sure it was; we were hanging around with Hizknits and his mom and Chickenknittle so of course we were having fun! But I wonder what we did and where we went... Monday was Olga's, Tuesday was somewhere, Wednesday was the fancy place, Thursday was... maybe that was our Mexican night. I shoulda tooken better notes, huh? After dinner, though, it was another knitting competition - the "you can knit with anything" competition, where 5 or 6 poor souls had to knit with things like: drill bits, Slim Jim beef jerky sticks, birthday candles, cake slicers, toothbrushes, paper towel roll tubes. Everyone managed to finish, proving: you CAN knit with anything! After that one, the teachers, Tina, and Cockeyed had to demonstrate knitting with turkey basters. Gotta tell ya, after watching the others knit with more challenging items, this looked like a (relative) cake walk! But fun to watch!
Friday was supposed to be an organized charity knitting day, but Nathania (who was going to lead us) couldn't make it, so there were 5 "let's just sit and knit charity blanket" stations for people to pop in and pop out of, and the rest of the time was the ultimate 'stitch and bitch' time - all damn day. Fabulous. A lot of people were working on their monkeys (I think this was where most of them turned into their over-the-top selves); I worked on my entrelac socks, happy for the chance to let the rhythyn of the 6x12 units take over. Oh yeah, I got to hold Stephanie's traveling sock and she held my entrelac sock! Wheee! Giddy with being so close to one of my idols! (It was really cool to think back... back when I was learning how to knit one sock on two circulars from Cat's book, and back when I didn't even know who the Yarn Harlot was, I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that I would ever meet them, much less be sitting between them, talking like they were real people! Awesome. I didn't even slobber too much over them or their knitting.)
That night was the talent show, sock puppet skit, sock monkey show-off time, and thank-the-organizers-and-staff time. The talent show had one knitter who recently learned how to yodel (like real yodeling, not just pretend-Tarzan stuff... who knew?), and a woman who had knit while doing lots of different things but who had never knit while dancing - so she danced and knit! The sock puppet skits (there were 3) were cute; each entry had to include a list of 8 sayings that were heard around Camp for the week, including "It's not Tina's fault!", "Don't touch my monkey," and some others I can't recall. We all sang the official Sock Camp song (an appropriate variation on Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love' - 'Addicted to Yarn,' created by Hizknits hizself), then lined up all our monkeys. Similar yarn, totally different monkeys. I especially liked Harlot's and Cat's monkeys: Harlot's knitting a sock on DPNs (toothpicks), Cat's knitting a sock on 2 circs (also toothpicks). Oh, and Stephanie made an argyle vest for hers. Because she could, silly. (The wine at 1:00 am may have helped...)
Cockeyed asked to be surrounded by monkey love (say that anywhere else and it might get you arrested), so her wish was fulfilled.
After that, we applauded and hooted and hollered long and hard for the staff and organizers and teachers who had made this thing come together so well. Tina and Cat and Stephanie and Debbie and Tammy and JC and CookieA and Marilyn and I can't even remember all the others - it was totally awesome and fun and exhilarating and just plain ole' wheeeee!!!!!
There will be a Sock Camp 2009 - I'm marking my calendar!
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