Knitlandia by Clara Parkes

Author:Clara Parkes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2016-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

A THING FOR SOCKS AND A VERY BIG PLAN: Portland, Oregon

THE CITY OF PORTLAND, OREGON, has long enjoyed a reputation for the quirky. The home of Voodoo Doughnut and Powell’s Books, the inspiration for the hit TV show Portlandia, a birthplace of food-truck culture, and host to the Velveteria: Museum of Velvet Paintings and the World Naked Bike Ride, Portland has never been one to reject the unusual. And so it was that, when a pair of knitters approached the Oregon Convention Center about renting it for a sock-knitting conference, little debate ensued over what the answer would be.

The Sock Summit was the offshoot of “seven lunatic women with a thing for socks and a very big plan.” At its heart were author and blogger Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (better known as the Yarn Harlot) and hand-dyer Tina Newton, aided by a dedicated staff of volunteers.

Along with Debbie Stoller, Stephanie shares the distinction of being one of the only knitting authors to hit the New York Times bestseller list. Hers has been the Oprah of blogs, with one mention holding the potential to make or break upstart designers and yarn companies. By the sheer force of her personality alone, she managed to raise more than $1 million for Doctors Without Borders. She does not do things small.

Which is why nobody was actually surprised when the news came out that she and Tina had rented out the Oregon Convention Center and were planning to stage an event there. Were we pleased and excited? Yes. Surprised? Not really.

This was 2009. Ravelry had been live for just two years and was still in beta. Major knitting conferences were still the domain of the XRX/Stitches franchise, with Interweave’s Spin-Off Autumn Retreat maxing out at just 200 people. Only after the runaway success of this show did Interweave and the publishers of Vogue Knitting wake up, sniff the air, and venture into the big ring themselves. It was almost inconceivable for a couple of indie upstarts to plan anything of convention-center magnitude. The fact that they intended to focus exclusively on socks seemed even crazier. But the name was pure genius: It would be called the Sock Summit.

We teachers believed in the idea, and forty of us heeded the call. It was an impressive list, with names like Nancy Bush, Cat Bordhi, Meg Swansen, Anna Zilboorg, Sivia Harding, Judith MacKenzie, Cookie A, and Anne Hanson, to name just a few. We all shared collective goose bumps upon hearing that Stephanie had managed to locate the legendary Barbara G. Walker and to lure her out of knitting retirement for what was her first appearance in decades. Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, by then in seriously poor health, was equally wooed.

Classes were scheduled on anything that could possibly relate to socks, from heels and toes to cast-ons and bind-offs, textured colorwork, arch shaping, photographing our work, and even the proper ergonomics of sock knitting. While an outsider might assume they would be hard-pressed to come up with seventy-eight sock-themed workshops that first year, in fact, the organizers had to reject far more proposals than they could accept.

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