Purly Whites wrote an excellent post the other day about the virtues and villainies of knitting two socks at once on two circular needles. I’m at the same point in my first pair attempting this technique, and I heartily agreed with most of her points, so I won’t duplicate her efforts. I’ll just add my own anecdotal evidence to the pool of knit blogger wisdom.

Casting on both socks at once was bitterly difficult. The first time I gave up. Granted, it was late and my mental powers were not at peak strength. The second time I managed to get the requisite stitches onto the two needles, with the working yarn remarkably at the same place on each sock. Unfortunately, this was some kind of act of mercy from above, and the higher powers did not choose to reveal exactly what they’d done, so I’m not at all certain I can replicate the process. Worse still, I discovered after my first row I was one stitch off on the first sock – 33 stitches on the front needle and 31 on the back needle. I could have just tinked back and slipped the first stitch to the back needle, but the situation raised a serious problem: the way I’d written my pattern, I needed to rotate each sock by three stitches clockwise after the cuff to align the heel. This is easy at one side of the sock, but the second sock prevents you from getting at the other side to slip stitches. You have to back the second sock off onto the trailing needle ends in order to access the stitches you need to move on the first sock. And then you have to get the second sock back on and in the right position. This requires excellent spatial intelligence or a healthy dose of blind intuitive luck. Through the latter, I succeeded, but it would take several more socks before I could feel confident of understanding the technique. The question is: do I want to knit several more socks using this approach?

After the first five or six rows, my answer would have been a resounding NO. It’s tricky enough to keep one sock from twisting, or from knitting with the tail by accident, etc. With two, it’s almost absurdly awkward. About ten rows in, I had enough fabric to tell what was what a little more easily, and several inches in, I finally wised up and clipped my tails shorter to eliminate some of the tangling. I use my cast-on tails to mark the beginning of my rounds rather than stitch markers, so I don’t like to weave them in right away. But I am willing to guess the cast-on process would be easier with a little experience under one’s belt. A second pair of socks might offer smoother sailing at this point.

I was lucky with these socks: I never had to tink back (which would require tinking back both socks, not just the one with the mistake, unless you backed the unaffected sock off the needles entirely), and I never made the error of failing to switch balls of yarn moving from one sock to the other (which would knit the two socks together). I also had no problem turning both heels at once.

And now that my socks have heels and half a foot each, I realize I will have worked the pair from start to finish in about three weeks, which is certainly a record for me. But are they really faster this way, or have I just given them more time than usual? After all, they’ve been on cross-country airplane trips with plentiful delays. But then I’ve been knitting a lot on my father’s sweater and other Christmas projects, and because the socks are less portable than one sock at a time would be, I haven’t done as much subway knitting with them. I’m going to hypothesize that two at once really is slightly faster, if only because you remove the mental block of second sock syndrome. As my poor mateless Retro Rib sock can attest, this is significant.

To be fair to the technique, I guess I’ll have to try it at least once more before I decide for or against it. But I have several single socks calling for mates, so for now I’ll continue to espouse the one-sock-on-two-circs method.