It's a what now?

My semantics prof has always taken an unusual interest in the stuff I'm knitting. It's not all that unusual for a professor to comment about my knitting, since I knit during my classes, but this particular professor tries to guess the identity of every project I bring to class. (I think he secretly wants to be a knitter.) Today he took a look at this:

and asked if I was making a trivet.

No, I said.

A what? I thought.

It turns out that some people, when they have to put hot dishes on the table, don't use a potholder. They use a trivet. If I were going to make a trivet, I think I would make it out of something thicker than sock yarn, but maybe the squareness of the thing just threw him off.

The non-trivet is, of course, the beginnings of another piece for the Sock Cabin Stashghan. I've been knitting on this almost exclusively since I started it- the log cabin thing is seriously adddictive- and here's what I've got so far:

Modelled by the capable husband. (Is there an official name for this kind of pillow? I get such strange looks when I call it a husband.)

I like the squares by themselves well enough, but I'm not really sure how they're going to look when I put them together. I'm trying to tell myself I don't care, and it's half true, but I do wonder about it from time to time.

When I started this thing, I was afraid I wasn't going to have enough sock yarn in my stash to get to the end of this blanket, especially because I blasted through lots of small bits on the first square. I now admit the total foolishness of this fear. I have not actually finished off a ball of yarn since the inside of the first square, and it occurs to me that this could be an enormous blanket by the time I've used up even a reasonable amount of the sock yarn stash. And the thought of all that blanket that lies ahead of me is enough to send me scrambling for the knitting. Clearly, I have some work ahead of me.

I need to learn to knit faster.