Let the Scarefest begin!

It’s no secret that my favourite season is autumn. I grew up in a town where as the summer wound down, the trees turned colour, and there was a hint of all the smells of fall in the air. Living in a city without a bunch of colour-changing maple trees has been a little disorienting…summer continues or ends on a whim, and the few varieties of deciduous trees seem to be a little confused at the whole process – plus, with the urban sprawl around here, the trees are fairly young and sparse.

I still try to keep my little rituals, though. I carve pumpkins, I try to get the house clean for winter, and I knit.  I knit a lot. One of the sly little enablers of my knitting addiction in the past couple of years has been the Super Sock Scarefest (aka: The Scary Sock Knitalong) on Ravelry. Usually I get one or two socks knit, and then real life responsibilities take over and I have to stop. Obviously, I’m not in it for the stamina…I’m in it for the fun!

Who wouldn’t want to participate in a knitalong that pairs scary movies and knitting? After all, when the weather is getting colder, you naturally want to hole up with a movie. When you’re getting closer to Hallowe’en, the movies generally get scarier. If you’re a knitter, you will happily knit your way through all of it.

The Scarefest organizers release one pattern every ten days starting on September 1st and ending on October 31st  each year, generally adding up to seven patterns. In addition to that, they also release bonus patterns for those who are ultra-fast knitters. The patterns are exclusive to the group for the run of the Scarefest (sometimes re-released to the public after a suitable time has passed), and anyone who signs up before September 1st is considered a part of that exclusive group. For those who are competitive, there is a contest for prizes – the scarier your picture(s) of your completed sock(s), the more chance you have of winning (again, I’m in it for the fun, not the prizes).

The Scarefest is getting ramped up to go…the first bonus pattern has just been released, and we’re about a week away from the first official pattern. It sounds as though we have an exciting couple of months of scary socks and movies coming up. I definitely recommend signing up – it only takes a couple of moments!

I may also have an ulterior motive for suggesting that my friends sign up, but that would be giving out spoilers…or maybe the appropriate word would be clues… 😉

And in somewhat related news, my Weeping Angels pattern can now be considered out of testknit…I haven’t had any new errors brought to my attention, so I took the testknit label off the pattern and updated the Ravelry page.  Happy Friday!