Well, thanks to Lydia, the new socks now have a formal name.

I'm calling them "Barley Sugar Column Socks." (Reference here.

I was not aware - or if I had seen it somewhere, hadn't registered it - of this style of columns. But it pleases me that the stitch pattern roughly approximates something really real.

I'm going to type up the pattern after I finish the first sock, and then beta-test that version on knitting the second sock.

I'm not sure how to post it; the Blogger configuration I have apparently doesn't allow you to make pages and post them and then link to them. I'd like to offer the pattern as a stand-alone page somewhere, so people could go to it and easily print the pattern out. (that's assuming people actually WANT the pattern).

I suppose I could also offer it as a "you email me and ask, I send you it as a Word document" (or if I wanna get all fancy and pull out my old copy of Acrobat, a .pdf document). I don't know. I'd love to have a separate "pattern page" to host these things but it doesn't look possible, not without getting pagespace somewhere else. (My university offers pagespace but only for course- or research-related stuff.)

(The funny thing? Yesterday I had written - but "saved as draft" a sort-of whiny post about the phenomenon of "long-tail bloggers" - which is being talked about by the political/media bloggers: apparently a lot of people expected that they'd get rich and/or famous off their blog, when only a few people did. Kind of like the knitting blogs - there are probably 10 or fewer that are read by hundreds of people each day, and then hundreds of blogs, like mine, that are read by 10 or fewer people each day. And I recognize and understand the feelings that the long-tail bloggers write about: there is a little bit of....well, "bitterness" is the word they used but it's not what I'd use, I'd say "disappointment" that their blog isn't more widely read and popular, and there's the old old schoolyard thing about popular vs. unpopular kids, and what does it take to be popular, and are the popular people really the best... And you know? Life really does seem to keep replicating junior high school. I wonder if perhaps the Buddhists were on to something, only the cycle we're really trying to break free of is the cycle of defining ourselves based on who we were when we were 13. Because, you know, 13 is the crap age of all crap ages. For me it was the total dark night of the soul, the deepest pit of hell, &c., &c. And yet, as glad as I am to be done with that age, the things I thought and felt then, the attitudes, come back to haunt me - the whole popular/unpopular thing and the eternal question of "I'm a nice person, nicer than some of those ratty 'popular' girls! In a Just World, I would be the popular one because I'm nice!"

But anyway...as I said, I didn't post the post because I decided it was whiny. One of the upshots of the post was a "would it kill ya to comment" comment - that I was feeling anonyomous and invisible. And then within hours I get two comments, which is about the most I ever get. So I don't know.

I do wish there were some way - some form - of people "leaving a stone" to mark that they had been there. Like the old Jewish tradition of placing a pebble on a gravestone as evidence that you visited the gravesite. Some of the spiritual blogs suggest using some kind of "emoticon stone" - something like this: (o) to indicate that you've been there, you read the post, you agree, but have nothing more to add.

the problem in my mind - and perhaps this comes from hanging out in grad school with too many people who had the 14-year-old-boy sense of humor, when I look at the symbol (o), it makes me think of a breast.)