Print, "hello world"

I'm coming into the last few weeks of my first year of physics grad school. I've got four exams coming up (two are finals, two are qualifying mastery exams), and I'm working on something for my research group. Of course, this means that my knitting is flying along.

I've got a bunch of projects going, due to me having plenty of time in class and lecture but not enough to just sit down and work on a particularly fiddly bit. As of late, I've been primarily working on a Ruby Red sweater from the Fall 2009 Knitty. I chose Malabrigo Sock in Impressionist Sky, so it's light, but not delicate. The body of the sweater is chilling in my bag, but one sleeve is right here on the desk and I figured I could show it off.

(Yes, I did put it in my mouth so I could show you the diamond detail on the cuffs. Shh.)

I'm swapping some of my early handspun for some glass buttons from Sylvus Tarn, since she does a lot more "arty" projects than I do and will make better use of a hopelessly thick-and-thin, unevenly spun, brightly colored yarn that I've tried knitting up into any number of things and just haven't liked. We decided on 3/4" diamonds in blue and white to echo the diamond pattern, but I told her that if an idea for an accent color struck her that I'd be up for something wild.

Speaking of other wild things, I have some Zauberball in the Shadows colorway. Being in a sock rut right now, something just didn't appeal to me about knitting it into normal socks, despite the fact that I specifically bought it for making socks. So I started thinking about how I could deal with the long color repeats. One thought was a triangular shaw- NO. Bad Jax. Socks, not shawl. Then I thought about Sidewinder, which of course appealed to me since I now have Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" stuck in my head. This is still a thought, but then I thought about how neat the long color repeats might look if I did the foot and the leg perpendicular to each other. Which made me think that it would be neat to knit a standard toe-up foot, then knit the leg perpendicular to it in garter stitch, attached on much like a shawl edging.

I'll leave you with this aside: am I the only one who, instead of knitting plain stockinette until the last few rows for plain-sock legs, switches to 2x2 rib/a similarly stretchy pattern where calf shaping would start to be useful? I'm sort of in love with the last pair of socks I did that way.