For Love of a Sock

My socks, thankfully not lost

There's almost nothing the fiber community won't do to help another knitter, crocheter, spinner, etc. out, so long as it's legal I suppose.

Sometime Monday morning, a knitter found a single hand knit sock in the Oklahoma City airport.  Recognizing the sock for what it is, a little piece of wonderful, she immediately set out to find it's owner.  She posted on Ravelry and immediately fellow knitters started passing the information around the net through Facebook and other media.  Someone mentioned it to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (aka The Yarn Harlot) and she blogged about it too. (Go read her post and the rest of her blog, and buy her books too, she's hilarious)

The finder of the sock was traveling out of Oklahoma City, so she left it with someone at the airport to be placed in lost and found.  Now someone who lives in the area is trying to track the sock in the airport to rescue it so a picture of the actual sock can be taken in further effort to reunite it with its owner. 

It may all sound a little silly if you're not a knitter or you've never experienced the pleasure of wearing hand knit socks, but I assure you it's not.  Somewhere there is a knitter with only one hand knit sock and not enough yarn left to reknit the lost sock.  That knitter is frantically looking through all their belongings and calling wherever they last stayed to see if the sock was left behind.  And when that knitter finally realizes the sock is no where to be found, that knitter will be very, very, very sad.

Imagine you just went on your dream vacation and bought a really special memento of your trip and it's been lost.  Yes, it's just a thing, and technically in this day and age you could probably make a call or go online and order another one, but it's just not quite the same is it as the one you actually bought while you were at the location it came from.  That knitter can make another sock.  They might even have or be able to find enough of that same yarn to remake a sock just like the lost sock.  They will probably make many, many, more hand knit socks in their knitting life time, but they will always wonder what happened to that sock.

So far, it doesn't appear that the owner of the sock has been found, so if you happen to know a sock knitter who traveled through Oklahoma City this week you might want to be sure they've got all their socks!