Survey Results and More

People are still hard at work on Mad Cow socks and it’s great to see that players are still posting them to share with us even if their divisions are full.  I know that many of us are getting a real kick out of seeing the differences in the color combinations.  Pictures of finished socks are also great blog fodder for your hosts so keep them coming.

Looking at the discussions on Flickr I also see people talking about what they’ve earned so far.  Check it out!  There were apparently more than a few among you who felt the awakening of a competitive beast inside you  – not that it’s a bad thing.  Many of you surprised yourselves with how quick you finished your socks.  Of course some of the lessons learned are more basic like the first time you did a short row heel or making jogless jogs.  All good things!

Felicia and I have been learning too.  Your answers to our little survey helped a lot.  You were pretty evenly split (49%-47%) among those who only want 1-3 days between rounds and those who need a little longer.  It’s understandable since we’re all really anxious to move along while, at the same time, we all have things to do besides knit. 

There was a much greater divide on the question of when to start the rounds.  The clear winner with 60% is the weekend but there were a few who made good arguments for why the weekdays are better (for them) and quite a few (30%) don’t care.

We have thought it all over and here is the deal.  We’ll post the specs – yarn requirement, needles and gauge if available – within 48 hours of the close of the last division.  For example, we would bet that we’ll have a 16th finisher in Wendy’s division (go Newbies!) by this evening.  If that’s the case then we’ll post the specs no later than Sunday night. 

Are we all clear so far?  Good, then let’s move on.

To try and keep things moving while still allowing for people to rest their hands, do the laundry, eat, sleep – we’re going to plan on starting the new round within 3-5 days of when we post the specs.  We’ll determine the start date of the next round with an eye towards keeping it close to the weekends – but it won’t always fall on a Saturday or Sunday.  We’ll post the start date for the next round with the specs so there will be time to prepare yourself.  Following the example above, if the specs are posted on Sunday then it’s likely that the next pattern will be sent to you on Thursday or Friday.

We will try to avoid releasing patterns on Easter and Passover.  I’m not sure how we’ll work around it but we’ll figure it out.

There is no one perfect solution that will work for everyone but we hope that this will work for most of you.