Good Evening Hogwarts Students! I’m Agatha Vablatsky and I will be acting as the dueling club coordinator for this term.

For new students, here is an explanation of how the dueling club will work:

Essentially, all participants will be organized into brackets where everyone will be paired up with one person. The pattern will be released, and the first person to receive a hat or a pair of gloves/mittens in the mail from their opponent will be dead. The person who is left standing will advance to the next round and will be paired with the winner from another pairing within the bracket. In the end, there will be one person standing from each bracket and they will be dubbed the dueling winner.

Patterns will start out easy and progressively get harder as the rounds progress. I will post the materials required 2 - 3 days before the duel officially begins. This will give you time to contact your dueling partner to get their shipping and sizing information. I will post a yarn weight, amount of yarn required and needle size along with any other notions or tools that the pattern requires. The dueling club is meant to be a stash busting event so you don't have to go out and buy specific yarns. The duel will officially begin 2 - 3 days later (at a specified time) with the posting of a pattern on the HSKS7 blog.

This term, there will be a bracket for hat knitters and a bracket for fingerless gloves/mittens knitters. You do not have to be a fast knitter to participate, but you should be able to finish a hat within 5 days and a pair of gloves / mittens in 1 1/2 to 2 weeks at minimum. In the HSKS6 dueling club, many of the hat knitters finished their hats within 1 – 2 days after the pattern was released. This is our first time for a gloves/mittens bracket but as a comparison, the fastest sock knitters from HSKS6 completed a pair of socks in about 2 days although many took between 3 – 5 days to complete a pair of socks.

Keep in mind that sometimes it comes down to a race of the owls, with the post office being the deciding factor. Completing a project a day or two before your dueling partner doesn't mean anything if your post office decides to mail your package out a day late.

As far as shipping requirements, overnight mail is NOT allowed. It must go Priority. We recommend mailing your projects with delivery confirmation because if projects are received on the same day, the delivery confirmation will let us know when it was delivered. This will help us to alleviate any possible disputes as to who killed whom first.

We will be including crocheters again this time around if we have enough interest! In the beginning rounds of the competition, you will have the option to knit or crochet within your bracket. I’ll pair knitters with knitters and crocheters with crocheters within the hat or gloves/mittens bracket. However, please note that the final round(s) will be knitting ONLY, so you must be able to knit to participate.

More than anything, this is just a fun project. Don't NOT join just because you think you are a slow knitter.

Interested? If you would like to join, e-mail me at hsksduelclub at gmail dot com with the following information:

Potter Name
Bracket: Hat or Gloves/Mittens
Craft: Crochet or Knit

Signups will continue through midnight CST on Tuesday, February 10th and the materials for round one will be posted on Wednesday, February 11th (time TBA). Round one will officially begin on Friday, February 13th (time TBA).

If you have further questions about the dueling club, please comment to this post and I will answer them in the comments so that others may get their questions answered too.

Agatha