The Knitted Walking Stick Cosy Competition 2007

WIN £40 IN YARN VOUCHERS!

Inspired by the dignifying powers of health-related knitting projects everywhere, The Missability Radio Show is organising a walking stick cosy knitting competition. With your great ideas, knitting skills and visionary powers, we can create a richly diverse collection of variations on the standard appearance of an ordinary grey walking stick .

The cosies will become part of The Missability Radio Show and will be shown alongside other material relating to the show such as the posters, stationary, video works, designs and interviews generated whilst making the project. Notable submissions will be described by our knitting correspondents on the programmes (due for podcast release 9th September!) Photographs and cosies will be publically exhibited from 12th – 16th September in The Drama Studio at Oxford Brookes University and from 12th – 19th September in The Oxford Centre for Enablement, Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford. The links below will hopefully cover any/all of your questions; you can download all of these guidelines in either PDF or Word format further down this page.

• What kind of walking stick is the cover for?
• What kind of materials can be used?
• Submission Guidelines
• When is the closing date of the competition?
• Will there be a gallery of submissions?
• How will the winner be selected?
• Technical Details
• Can I make a crochet entry?
• Downloads

Walking Sticks to be covered

This competition is really intended for every kind of walking stick you can imagine; it could be a hiking stick that you use for hiking with or it could be a mobility cane. It could be made from wood or it could be made from metal. If you do not know anyone who has a walking stick or uses any kind of walking equipment then you can use the measurements of my walking stick to base your walking stick cosy design on; just click on the image below to go to a bigger version.

Materials

The materials you can use really depend on your cosy category. Entries made in the Fantastical Designs category can really be made out of anything at all, whereas entries placed in the Real Life category need to bear in mind the function of the walking stick as well as being elegant. If the stick is going to be used every day, a hand-wash-only knitted cover in yarn that felts easily might not be so good and if the material is something like silk or ribbon, you need to think about strategies for stopping it from slipping off the stick! Whether for Real Life or Fantastical purposes, a baggy cosy that won’t stay up probably isn’t ever really a good look.

Submission Guidelines

Send your completed cosy by 7th September to:

Missability Mail! | PO Box 1481 | OX4 9DL | UK

Your Submission must include:

• Your knitted walking stick cosy
• A completed submission form

The closing date of this competition is 7th September.

Will there be a Gallery?

There is a members-only online Gallery at Flickr; you can request an Invitation here and after the cosies have been shown to the public, the online gallery will become open to the public too. Photos of all or any stages of the progress of your cosy making venture can be posted to the Group.

How will the winning stick be judged?

There are two categories for this competition; the winner in each category will be awarded £40 in yarn vouchers. There is no limit on submissions. The first category is Fantastical Designs and the second is Real Life. Entries will be judged by walking stick users and The Oxford Bluestockings, a fantastically talented and accomplished bunch of knitters based here in Oxford. These are the winning criteria for each category:

Fantastical Designs

The winning walking stick cosy design in this category…

• will be, quite simply, fabulous. It will be so fantastical, so flamboyant and so luscious that everyone who sees it simply *must* have one
• will be utterly desirable
• will be judged on textural pleasingness, colourful richness and all round bling factor
• will be completely over the top
• will be lots and lots and lots of fun
• will possess definite WOW factor
• will not necessarily be useful or practical

Real Life

The winning walking stick cosy design in this category…

• will show clear evidence of practical consideration
• will be conceivably useful and desirable for a real-life situation you know about or can easily imagine (it may be a walking stick cosy for someone who has a wedding to attend and wants their stick to match their dress, for example)
• will show clear evidence of practical thinking and appropriate use of materials (a cosy for everyday use made in durable and machine-washable yarns, for instance)
• will show a level of personalisation – the winning design will be very specific to the imagined or real end user of the cosy
• will be innovative – there is nothing to say that walking stick s cannot have pockets or attachments and so on. Consider ways of improving the functional performance of a walking stick without compromising on its performance!
• will be elegant and beautiful without compromising on usefulness or practicality

Think carefully about which category you decide to design within; sometimes it’s nice to just go wild and to imagine without limits, and at other times nothing is more beautiful than the elegance of a useful design.

Technical points

A walking stick cosy is basically a knitted tube that can be slipped onto a walking stick and has some means of staying up.

When I made my knitted walking stick cosy I used Lana Grossa sock yarn. A 100g ball of yarn weighed 67g when I was done, so it took 33g of self-patterning sock yarn yarn to complete one knitted walking stick cosy. It took around 2 or 3 hours only. That ought to give some idea of yardage and scale of project. I used straightforward stockinette stitch and a long rib at the top and bottom of the tube so the cosy would cling to the stick. Re: gauge, My walking stick cosy is 24sts per round. I knit it in the round on 2.5mm bamboo needles. I measured every part of the stick and did a gauge swatch so everything would match up. Gauge is essential for this project as baggy or slack cosies present obvious practical/stylistic problems.

The walking stick cosy made in this way fits both my wooden stick and my grey metal one.

Crochet

Submissions can of course be completd in crochet and will be judged in exactly the same way as knitted submissions. ‘The Missability Radio Show Knitted and Crocheted Walking Stick Cosy Competition’ was just getting too bulky as a title!

Downloads

You can download all the information on this page as a Word or PDF File:

Word Doc.

PDF. file format

You need to download and complete a Submission form to include with your entry:

Word Doc.

PDF. file format