Someone assassinated Miriam Bissen a few weeks ago.

It was an especially cruel demise, the way it happened right there in the living room in front of her grandkids.

For days she had frozen in fearful anticipation every time a delivery truck rolled through her Briargate neighborhood. When the package finally arrived she tore it open - and just like that, she was a goner.

The weapon: a pair of handknitted socks the color of Fruit Loops cereal.

Before you send condolence flowers, know that Bissen is alive and probably out shopping for yarn this very minute. She is only dead to the 1,152 knitters worldwide who have been playing Sock Wars.

They try to knit each other to death.

The contest started in Northern Ireland and is taking the knitting world by storm. At last count, all but a handful of Colorado Springs players had fallen prey to the hoards of cutthroat crafters in this third episode. By the time you read this, the most recent game may be over.

Players sign up online and receive a dossier with the sock size, address and name of a player who becomes their "target." A unique pattern is posted online that everyone must use.

Each participant madly knits a pair of socks and ships them off to their target. That player is eliminated from the game as soon as she receives the socks. She then sends her assassin the pair of socks she was working on. That assassin must then finish knitting those socks and send them to their victim's target. And so it goes until there is only one Supreme Warrior Knitter standing.

The game is loosely patterned after Assassin, a college campus game in which participants shoot their targets with water guns or tap them with spoons.

A New Jersey woman killed Bissen.

"I only had one toe left to knit on my socks when I got killed," Bissen says.

It is pretty amazing that she and her daughter, Candi Roberts, a local ambulance dispatcher, were even in the contest.

"When Candi called me and told me we should play Sock Wars I reminded her that neither of us knew how to knit," she says with a laugh.

Bissen, who is a quilter, bought a knitting instruction book, and they taught themselves to knit while they played.

"I knew heels would be hard," Bissen says.

She ran into technical difficulties when her bamboo knitting needle broke on a weekend night when the knitting store was closed. She used her husband's saws to cut a metal knitting needle down to size.

"I even had to grind the points down. I didn't want to miss a minute of knitting." She was still working on the socks 21/2 weeks later when she got killed.

Roberts is proud of her personal hit.

"I killed somebody in Arizona who had already killed five people by the time I killed her."

Karen Auckenthaler, a local CPA, had her own sock problems.

"I couldn't get the pattern right," she says. "I finally put them in the mail on my way to work. But the same day when I went home for lunch, I found a package waiting for me. I got wiped out."

She received pink and yellow socks knitted by a George Washington University student who also sent along a sympathy card and a chocolate bar.

And therein lies the real fun of the game - getting to know players from around the world.

On the online war forum, players eagerly check the "fallen comrades" list, and even give each other tips about tricky stitches. Some posted photos of their socks. One woman pooled red yarn around her socks so it looked like blood; another tied a noose around hers.

Some knitters give themselves nom de guerres. Lucille Reilly, a Denver musician, calls herself Wool Warlock. A winner of a previous episode called herself Mama Sockster.

Reilly, who got killed by a pair of purple and white socks, is planning a wakeluncheon for Colorado players.

It will include an obituary contest, she says.

And of course, everyone will wear their death socks.

-

Contact the writer: 636-0371 or carol.mcgraw@gazette.com

TO ENLIST

Looking for a knitting or crocheting war? Here are some that will start soon.

• yarnsmackdown.com: Next event starts Aug. 8. Deadline to sign up is July 31. There will be crocheting and knitting categories.

• hat-attack.com: Next event starts Sept. 16; sign-up is under way.