One Pair, One Needle

In a forum on Ravelry we were chatting about knitting two socks at the same time, magic looping the needle. One woman asked - one loop or two? for the life of me, I cannot figure out how you would do this with only one loop - so I told her I would take photos of how I do it. Works the same with toe up or cuff down socks. You have half of each sock on one side of the cable - dividing the sock for top of foot and bottom of the foot. Usually, these both have the same amount of stitches. For this pair of socks, I am using a 47" Addi Turbo Lace needle, the cable is red. I have used a knit picks circular as small as 32" before, but it's tight. When I start knitting, I always put a stitch marker on the first sock. Just one - and it doesn't matter where, it's just there so that if I should put my socks down in the middle of a round, I know which way I was headed. If you click on the photo, you can make it bigger and see the details. In the first photo, I'm at the begging of a round and not ready to knit. Both needle tips are together at the right of the work (as you look at the photo). In order to knit, I'm going to pull the needle from the bottom of the socks out enough to move it around and get it into position to knit. In this photo, I have stopped knitting halfway through the first sock. You can see there are loops on both the left and the right of the socks. The loop on the left keeps the stitches of that sock from coming together. Here I've finished the top of the foot portion on both socks, but haven't pulled the needles around to be ready to work back. It does seem like there is a bunch of pushing and pulling of needles around but no more than the fumbling that I was doing with 3 double pointed needles holding my sock and a working needle. Plus when I'm transporting socks on a long circular needle - the worst that has happened to me is that the loop keeping one sock in two halves get pulled all the way in. That's super easy to fix! Much easier than picking up dropped stitches because they've fallen off a double pointed needle. These knee socks are a future gift. They were started on the 31st of January, but then because I didn't take into account how much the 'fabric' would shrink when stretched around a leg and how horrible it would look stretched. So I riiiiiped them out and cast on again adding an additional 8 stitches. This time, rather than measuring when the fabric was flat, I measured when it was on my leg. For me, the benefits of knitting both at the same time are huge. First - these socks are long and I know I would never knit the second if they were knit one at a time. So, when I finish I am done! Second, any changes made to a pattern are done to both socks at the same time. Third, it takes me about a week of singular focus to make a single sock. Amazingly enough - it doesn't take me much longer than that to make a pair.