On the needles: Pondemonium and a real, live sock

It's cute, but what is it, right? Not a hat -- it's Pondemonium, which will, when it is done, be a gift for a colleague whose wife is expecting a baby this spring. After the sleeves go on, the embroidery happens to turn the squiggles and blobs into snakes, spiders, frogs, and ducks. Appropriate for a couple of wildlife biologists, no? The original pattern calls for Rowan Wool Cotton, but buying all those balls at about $10 per ball would have cost over $120 to make the sweater. I settled for Elann Sonata in all-cotton, and I'll put a button placket in one shoulder to make it easier to get on and off since the cotton yarn is less elastic than the wool-cotton blend.

And isn't it time I knit something for myself? I bought a 450 yard skein of Pagewood Farm hand-dyed Blue-face Leister sock yarn from the Rose and Ram knit shop. That ought to make a few pairs, I reckon. I've knit bed socks and once knit a pair of socks from worsted weight yarn, but this is my first pair of real, live, sock yarn socks, proper socks, wear-out-in-the-street socks. I'm using the basic top-down sock recipe from Knitting Rules!, knit in the traditional way on DPNs. Isn't that colorway delicious? It's called "Meadow," but it reminds me more of a pond with purple and blue iris reflected in it:

I'm thinking of making this a sock year, and explore knitting toe-up socks, magic loop socks, and whatever other sock-knitting options I find time to indulge in, just to try them all out and decide how best I want to knit socks. There's even a spiral tube sock I found in an old WWII-era Red Cross knit for the troops book that I might try out.