Embossed Leaves socks and birthday yarn...

Here is my birthday present from my sister. Lovely sock yarn, the colors are close but not exactly accurate. The pale green in the top left is Merino Gems in willow, the blue/purple/green is Cherry Tree Hill supersock and the pink/peach/purple is Koigu. The Cherry Tree Hill and Merino Gems are from Darn it Yarn! I'd have to say these are my three favorite sock yarns. All very very soft and they come in beautiful colors. Thanks Pam!

The light green is destined to be Embossed Leaves Socks by Mona Schmidt from the Interweave Knits Winter 05 magazine. I have been busy making sweaters of late, but haven't forgotten my favorite portable knitting, socks. The sock yarn arrived Wednesday night and by Thursday morning there was sock progress. I woke up early (thanks, Scout) picked up my sock yarn and needles, turned on Turner Classic Movies and found the Thin Man was starting. Wonderful yarn and one of my all time favorite movies, a great way to start the day.

Here is the progress on the embossed leaves socks, I started Thursday morning and worked on them a little Friday night. The chart is fairly easy to remember, I still keep it handy because I haven't knit enough lace type things to trust my memory yet... I still am amazed as the pattern appears before my eyes as I knit, although I'm starting to be able to see what should come next by the pattern repeat above. The simple combination of knits, purls, k2tog and ssk result in amazing overlapping leaves. It's a lovely pattern, and I think these socks will be for me, although I can see this being one of the sock patterns I knit over and over again. I have a couple different sock patterns that are my standard socks that I have memorized so I don't have to carry a pattern around with me.

Which reminds me, I need to find one of my simple patterns to take with me to a sock party! Some knitting librarians I work with want to make socks! I'm bringing my sock patterns to help get them started and they are bringing their sock stuff and pizza! What could be more fun than an excuse to get together with fun people and knit socks? I can't think of a thing.

Speaking of Librarians... have any of you looked at LibraryThing ? It's an online library cataloging service type thing. It allows people to catalog their own collections of books ( although I can already see using it for movies, cds, knitting patterns, Audible books, etc.) and also allows people to create their own tags for items. At first I didn't see the power of this idea, but LibraryThing allows you to see others collections that are similar to yours, based on real subject headings and your own descriptions of items in the tags.

After reading about the tag idea I found that the user tags are actually quite an interesting idea. People are creating their own 'subject headings' or descriptions of their books. Working daily with the DDC, and being fully aware of the limitations of controlled vocabulary and somewhat artificial official subject headings, I am falling in love with this idea. These tags don't replace subject headings, they enhance them. I have often wanted to be able to search our catalog for 'chick lit' novels, but that's not an 'official' subject heading, so you get nothing. Library Things' tagged collections could make searching for things like 'chick lit' so much easier and possibly more interesting since definitions of that term vary with the user. This direct, unpredictable, messy, small d democratic type of catagorizing really appeals to me. I even love the term that has come to describe it, folksonomy. I would not give up the precision of actual subject headings, but as an addition or enhancement, tags could be the frosting on the cake.

Too much librarian jargon? I'll close with a cute cat picture. Scout and sock yarn.