At its very best it's a bad idea. And yet...

Just about every set of DPNs I have is missing its fifth needle. Because it broke, or I dropped it at the food court and it got thrown away (and hey, it's not as if I've had a conversation with every single food court employee that begins with "what're you making?" and involves me turning the part-sock rightside up and includes observations about the teeny size of everything and often a joke about not having to by socks at Wal-Mart. Or anything.) or is just lost in the jumble of debris that I refer to as my room. And most of the time this is okay because I only use four anyway. Usually I can even plunder the sedimentary layers of junk on my desk and come up with the missing one.

But flutter-by calls for five needles, and I want to use my knitpicks (stabby, soooo stabby) ones, and I can only find four of them, despite several expeditions into the desk litter. Which I'm thinking means that I'll be using four metal needles and one bamboo one. Because walking around the food court knitting a sock with matching needles doesn't look ridiculous enough.

Here is my Costa Rica knitting:



I knit to the end of the gusset decreases over the day of travel that it took to get to San Jose and didn't touch the thing until I got home. (I had another day's worth of travel but somehow didn't get around to knitting. *coughHarryPottercough*)

But the rest of the foot didn't take too long, and I'm now halfway into the next sock, the colorway of which resembles the first colorway about as much as a fully-loaded 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee resembles an egg. Which is to say... not really so much. Okay, well, now that I get them out at the same time and compare (are you taking notes? I really should be charging you for these smashing insights) the difference isn't that striking. The colors are pretty similar, I guess, just in a different, though still random pattern. Why am I still writing about this?

In other news, my self-designed blue pouchy thing is coming along at a slow but steady pace. In a stroke of genius, I knit the turn for what will be the bottom of the pouch on a smaller pair of needles, because the gauge for garter was expected to be a bit bigger, but alas, have only switched one of the needles back to the bigger size despite being a solid inch back into the pattern stitch. Oh, and also I can't find the second bigger needle, so that's stuck until I do some more desk-diving. Maybe Mr. Straight Size 6 ran off to Jamaica with Ms. Size 1 Double Point Thang. I wouldn't blame them.