Two Socks At Once

 For me, making socks is more or less a fun thing to do.  The thing that is NOT fun about it is having to knit a second sock, SO...I have learned how to knit two socks at once on two circular needles.

These socks are baby socks I made, intending to gift.  Sadly, I learned a lesson this time.  I used the same pattern and followed it precisely.  However, you can see that one "pair" of socks is slightly smaller than the other "pair".  This is the result, I think, of a different amount of tension in my hands (and spirit!) as I was knitting each pair.  I am still cogitating over whether to gift the socks or not.

How I plan to solve this problem in future socks is that I will take the time to wind each ball of sock yarn into two yarn cakes then I will be knitting both socks for each pair at the same time.  That will make the difference.  This time I was so interested in getting rolling on the socks that I just took the whole of each ball of yarn and cast on two different colors of sock yarn at once.  It was not the brightest idea.

Today I decided to wind the first two "sock cakes" for knitting the next pair of socks!  Here they are:

This should help with knitting two socks the same size!!

One other thing I learned while knitting these socks is that knitting two socks at once does not take the same amount of time as knitting two socks on double pointed needles consecutively.  It actually takes less time.  PLUS the two socks at once are more likely to be consistent. I think it took me about 5 hours to makes these socks, but that might be wrong.  It might be that it took 5 hours to knit two socks and another 5 hours to knit the second two socks.  I will have to try that out next tine and keep track of the  actual time.  That would be worth knowing...sort of let me know if I have time to knit a pair for a particular purpose.