Going Loopy
In between spending too much time on Ravelry and attempting to get back to my PhD, I've been managing to squeeze in quite a bit of knitting time. I've finished two Christmas gifts, which I will show soon and started a third.
On top of this, I decided to see if I could understand this Magic Loop malarkey. One of the Christmas gifts I finished was a pair of socks and although I was sure I had faithfully recorded the numbers of rows and the amount of stitches used for turning the heel when knitting the first sock, the second definitely came out a wee bit smaller. This made me increasingly intrigued to work out how knitting two socks at the same time might happen.
First I looked at the Knitting Help video on small diameter knitting on one circular needle and came up with the little fingertip-sized piece below. I was so excited. Its so easy and now I see why my Knitpicks Options don't do really small cables because you actually (oddly) need a long one to do small circular knitting. (sorry for rubbish pics)


Now, although I am indeed showing off that I managed what in the past I imagined to be pure knitting witchcraft, I will definitely need to knit some trial (plain and maybe very little) socks this way before I believe the magic of the loop. I'm also not sure that I might prefer double pointed needles to this method. In a way its too early to tell, but something about it reminded me of driving an automatic compared to a manual, its fun and all that, but there's nothing like the feeling of control when you change gear.
We'll see...