When I get to the toe of the sock, I like to do paired decreases at each side,* sometimes with a round (or two) of no decreases in between and sometimes not, depending on how long I need the toe to be. In other words, I just make it up as a I along. The smart thing to do would be to record what I did on the first sock so that when I come to the second sock, I can do the same thing. But noooooo, I just wing it, don't write anything down, then try to figure it out when I come to the toe of the second sock. Why on earth do I do this? I really need to keep better notes on my knitting. I need a lab notebook of knitting. Perhaps I should start that today.
A solution that I had come up with was to knit both socks at the same time using magic loop (I prefer magic loop to dpns for most circular knitting). I stopped doing this because I mostly knit socks on the go. Because they are so small socks make a good travel project. Well, knitting two socks at the same time means two balls of yarn which would sometimes get messy (I also tried using one ball of yarn and knitting with both ends at once and that was okay, but still not ideal) and could be especially problematic when I was knitting during a seminar (because they have the lights down so we can see the slides). Having to carry around enough yarn to work on two socks at once also make the project a bit more bulky. Finally, it felt like it took forever to make progress. I usually knit socks with fingering weight yarn on size 0 needles which means A LOT of stitches. And since I was only working on the socks on the go, I would only be able to knit a little at a time and therefore it seemed like I was making no progress at all. Still, I might go back to it because it does make it easier to make identical looking toes and it's a good way to avoid Second Sock Syndrome.
I bring this up because last night I was working on the toe of a second sock and had to take the time to minutely inspect the toe of the first sock to see how I did it (and I really wanted to know exactly how I did it because I thought I had done a really good job on that toe). I finally gave it up and started to wing it. We shall see how the toe of the second sock turns out! I can't show you a picture because it is a present for Christmas. I'll show you a picture after I give them to the recipient.
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*What this means is that, using the magic loop method, I divide the stitches evenly on the two needle points. I knit until the last three stitches, do a left leaning decrease, knit one, switch to the other side in the manner of the magic loop, then knit one and do a right leaning decrease. I then knit on that side until the last three stitches and decrease in the same manner as before. Therefore, I decrease four stitches per round.
