Thursday, September 27, 2007

An issue of numbers

For those not on Ravelry, there's been a discussion about the contest for the number of socks.

I thought I'd bring it up here.

RoseRed and I were discussing this and wondering if weighting the socks might be worthwhile? Let's say someone makes 20 pairs of baby socks and someone else makes ten pairs of men's socks, for example. The 20 pairs of baby socks are really much quicker to make than the 10 pairs of socks for men with big feet. Would it be fair for the baby sock maker to win?

What if we weighted baby socks with a kind of handicap, say making each pair worth .5?

Does that make it more fair? We'd be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.

5 comments:

Lynne said...

Just thinking on-screen. How about literal weight? How many grams of yarn did you use? Of course, that would require everyone having digital scales so probably impractical!
Perhaps number of stitches/rows? Baby socks obviously have less of both!
BTW, 8ply socks are also much faster to knit than 4 ply for the same size.

Anonymous said...

*sob* "for those not on ravelry" *sob*

Ok, now that I've built a bridge to move past my non-ravelry-inclusion issewes...

...I think that point-weighting might not be such a bad idea.

Mind you, I'm not planning on knitting any "little people socks" so it doesn't apply to me.

Ann said...

I will prefer the idea of counting 2 pairs of children socks as 1 pair of adult (men or ladies)socks. This will be easier & less technical than weighing the socks as 8ply will weigh more & for those (like me) who doesn't have a digital scale. Hope this helps.

TinkingBell said...

I agree on the men/baby thing - but where does it stop - knee his vs ankle cuffs, plain vs difficult and fancy; How about submitting photos and stats and leaving it to a pamel?

Anonymous said...

I was just thinking also that making baby/kids socks count as half makes a lot of sense. I agree that it's simple and easy, plus it doesn't stop people from being able to make kids socks.