When I started the project I’m about to show you, I believed that I was doing it because somehow, even though I had only done it once before, it was traditional that I do it.

(I am somehow the sort of person who thinks that something that was a good idea is totally a tradition instantly, even if it hasn’t got the background for it.)  Last Summit, I cast on and knit a pair of socks for Tina over the course of the event, because really, what sort of commemorative thing makes more sense for a Sock Summit than a pair of socks?  (I gave it some thought.  A plaque seems dim.) This time, I procured (read – stole) a skein of "A Paler Shade of ST-1" the morning of the Summit, and I cast on as we drove to the convention centre.

Natalie and Stephen helped.

I knit on it all through the Summit (when I was able. I may have briefly forgotten how to knit right there in the middle) and I had a ton of help.

Teachers, friends, ST-2s and volunteers…

Everyone who crossed my path (or Natalie’s – she was a big help in getting the sock around the Summit) was asked to put in a few stitches.


By the end, the last moments of the Summit, we were turning the heel of the first sock, all of us, and it was a magnificently odd thing.


Suddenly, I had the better part of a sock in my hand – and really – other than the first few stitches and a few here and there when I had a minute, I really hadn’t knit it.

I looked at that sock then, and I realized that I’d started it to continue the tradition of commemorative socks from the first time, and realized in the end that they’d ended up being way, way more than that.

They were symbols of the whole summit.  Symbols for Tina’s feet. 

Symbols about teamwork, and many hands making light work, and how much can get done if a lot of people do a little, and that’s really what the whole Summit was about this time.  The whole thing came together in the most beautiful expression of teamwork – and here there are, the little socks that think that’s true.

I hope that they mean the same thing to Tina that they do to me.  Two woollen expressions of what got built, 

and how.

(PS. I knit the second one by myself.  I’m not a total slacker.)