So you want to know the other reason that lovely gray sock is taking forever?  Besides being a pattern precisely calculated to be as slow as humanly possible to work?  It’s because I’ve have had a lapse of knitting fidelity.  I became distracted.  It could have been by these…

Swatches.  Piles of them.  Little bits of color and fluff, none even as big as an index card.

These aren’t proper swatches (and you are not allowed to cry about things not fitting if your swatches look like this).  These are trial swatches, proto-swatches if you will.  Color doesn’t matter, fiber content and yarn weight do.  They’re for working out stitch counts and seeing if that chart does what you think it does and seeing what happens if you put your needle in that way instead of over here like normal.  They’re the knitting version of post-it notes.

Not one of those will stay in the form seen here.  Not one of those colors, not one of those yarns.  But all of them are the start of projects.  (Especially that green one…that fabric is just freaking nifty…expect to see more of it.)

They’re an important step on the way to Book the Second.  Book the Second will also be really freaking nifty, and you should definitely expect to hear more about it.  But not quite yet.