June 13, 2009: The fourth annual World Wide Knit In Public (WWKIP) Day found me not with a group of fellow knitters, but as the sole practitioner at a rabbit show.  The second Saturday in June is also the usual date of one of the shows our local all-breed rabbit club hosts, so I spent pretty much all day there.  I was breathing that morning, so had tucked some knitting in my bag, just in case.  You know.

Although I didn’t embody the full intent of the original organizer’s idea of congregating with others to knit in full public view, I did pull out my sock late in the afternoon when there was a long enough break for me to be able to sit down for a while.  And it did result in some questions and knitting talk with some rabbit breeder friends.  When I off-handedly mentioned to one of them that this was KIP day, my eldest daughter decided we needed to turn it into a photo op for a blog entry.  So she found me a spot that would include some of the rabbit show activities (although things had wound down quite a bit from the morning), and snapped a few pictures…

See? It’s a sock.

But the big news for me was that one of my rabbits, a black otter Mini Rex doe named Jill, won Best Opposite Sex of Breed!  For the uninitiated, that means that of the 100 or so Mini Rex rabbits entered in the Open category (not sure of the number, but I know there were 148 total entries in youth and open), she was the best doe!  For all practical purposes, she was runner-up to the Best of Breed buck.

Jill and her ‘trophy’

She didn’t win anything in the second show that day other than the expected class and variety, since she was the only otter there *sigh*, but I was delighted when another friend’s lilac Mini Rex buck won Best of Breed!  In order to appreciate that fully, you need to know that lilacs are one of the color varieties that do NOT typically do well at that level.  Lilac is created by recessive alleles of 3 of the 5 ‘major’ coat color gene series, so they are not only rather uncommon, but with their smaller gene pool, are harder to improve in type and fur while still retaining that lovely silvery-grey color.

Sam had turned to ask me whether I thought this was the year a lilac would win Best of Breed, to which I laughingly replied that I expected it would be a few years before that happened.  And then a few minutes later, it DID happen!  I guess one of the lessons Sam is taking away from that incident is that he shouldn’t count on my predictions.

Now, I’m thinking about which of my lilac does I might be able to wheedle a breeding for…