It is 12 degrees F heading for a high of 15 and a low of 8 today.  A pair of woolie socks would be very nice right about now, but I have miles to go before I wear.

Madness in the method.  I started by casting all stitches onto one tiny toothpick-sized needle, moved half the stitches to a second toothpick-sized needle, and started knitting with a third needle, introduced a fourth, and–high wire circus act–added a fifth.  I was so tempted to start with a circular needle, with all the space in the world to spread out the stitches to count and corral them, but I stuck with the method as described in the course video.  Adding each needle was like adding a ball with juggling but I stayed the course and got them all in play.

One newbie issue was to be expected, awkwardness with those little sticks and sharp points sticking out in all directions.  Having done a little needle test swatch knitting in the round helped prepare me but this time there were a lot more stitches and I was working in a rib pattern rather than a simple knit.  The first surprise was how easily stitches could fall off the needle to the front or the back.  Fortunately I am pretty adept at picking up dropped stitches but it was annoying to have to stop and fix them, hard to get a rhythm going when it is slip-slide, whoops, [expletive], inhale, fix time after time.

By squashing the stitches to the center of the needle before moving on to the next I have found they are behaving better.  Or perhaps they are just staying put because I have more rows knit to stabilize them.  We shall see if my technique has improved when I start the process again on sock number two.  Optimistically I am saying when rather than if.

The second sock syndrome still worries me a bit.  Will I really want to start this all over again when I finally finish the first?  With that in mind, I ordered a second set of these itty bitty needles thinking that next time it would make sense to work on two socks simultaneously: do the cuffs on the first then do the cuffs on the second, do the legs on the first then do the legs on the second, and so on.

As it turns out, it is a fortunate that I ordered more of these needles.  While fixing dropped stitches for the umpteenth time, I heard a horrible snap.  And with that snap came stitches falling off the center of the needle as well as the front and back.  Now I know why the included 6 needles in that pack. I thought it was because they were so tiny that they could get lost easily, but perhaps it was because they are just brittle little sticks and not long for this world. Thinking I was in no hurry when I ordered more I went with the very free but very slow shipping option. I will be holding my breath until they arrive. Snap or lose, my gauge would change if I substituted a different needle.  I need to stay with these for the duration and now I am driving without a spare tire.

Am I a punk knitter?  Maybe I do need to stop hugging trees and go back to metal.