Ask and you shall receive - answers, that is

Right. The socks I am knitting are for me. It would break my selfish heart to knit socks for anyone else with that beautiful yarn.

To get to the question if these are "mere" socks: my dear Sultry in my dreams, of course no pair of hand knitted socks deserves to be called "mere" but I don't know about the "major" either. With these I am merely continuing two of the mini cables of the rib along the side of the leg. I like the effect and am happy to blame the nice outcome on the yarn. It has some more body than normal sock yarn and hence the cables are more plastic.

I cannot wear knitted socks in shoes - I have, uhm, hot feet (not to mention the sweatiness that comes with that). These will be socks to be worn at home when I need comfort and warm feet, probably sometime next winter.

For the alpaca/silk/cashmere yarn I put some numbers in my Knitware after I knitted a swatch and voilà, what you can see are the first centimeters of the back of my fabulous sweater to be. Not to be for a long time though because I have to knit it on 2.75mm (No 2) needles.

At this point I want to mention that I love the Knitware software. I have read some negative statements about it on KR (like, one has to pay for the update, come on, it's only 60 bucks to begin with and updates don't come along every couple of months) which I cannot agree with. Especially since it's not about what the software is capable of doing but about how the sales are handled. This: "I can't call (them) as I don't live in Canada." says it all in my opinion. Hello!