knitting blues

So after finished my rainbow scarf for CBC (I still have to block it this weekend-hopefully it's not too late), I finally started my skull socks for Jason (brother in law). So I picked up some black sock yarn and same weight white yarn from my favorite knitting store, Darlene's Yarns (oh, and I just found out that there are TWO knitting stores in PG, but thankfully the other one is not walking nor bus distance so it will have to be more rare visits which will help not kill my finances) Anyhoo, so I've got this yarn and I find some online knitting patterns that I want, very simple, I want to knit stockinette stitch because I came up with my own skull pattern (sooooo bloody cute) that I can do with fair isle. But when I look at the yarn for all the sock patterns, they are all worsted weight, and my sock yarn is super fine. Grumble grumble. So I find this algebraic sock pattern which looks fun. I knit up a swatch on size 2.75 needles and figure out I have 10 stitches per inch. So I fill in the x and start knitting on my dpn and mmm... it's coming out super lacey, which isn't too surprising because I have a really hard time knitting on dpn (double pointed needles, sorry, that's when you have a whole bunch of little needles that have a point on each end and you can knit in a circle, you can use four or five at a time) as well, I was doing a 3x3 ribbing (that's when you knit three, than purl three, which pulls the yarn together so it's tighter for the top of the sock to hold it on better) and because the stitches are so small and because the yarn is black I kept on messing up my stitches, so after three rows I decided to frog it (rip it all out). So this was all at school and when I got home that night after a boring seminar (which was a shame because I normally really enjoy that prof's seminars), I came home, got my smallest needles which were 2.25 (mm) and knit another swatch with 30 stitches but this time I carried the yarn along that back in order to knit techniqually in the round even though I wasn't, cause if you knit purl it's different than just knitting every row to get the stockinette stitch (which you do when you knit in the round), sorry this is completed and boring for none knitters, I understand if you have stopped reading by now, but there is a point here, my latest dilemma? My stitch count for my gauge on smaller needles is 8 stitchs per inch! What the heck? Does knitting a swatch in the round make that much of a difference? I was sooo confused last night. I mean, logic would dictate that if you knit with smaller needles using the same yarn, you should have a greater number of stitches per inch. For instance, if I used this yarn on 6mm needles, it would probably be like five stitches per inch, unless I have gone mad. Sometimes I think I have. I've been knitting seriously (kinda) for over a year now and I still do not understand how yarn works and stuff (like at Christmas, Jenn got me this beautiful hand dyed wool from Darlene for me and I tried to do all this elaborate lace work with it and now I know... you can't do that with that yarn, it just looks messy). So I am confused! So I'm going to go ahead with my new measurement and hopefully I won't finish the first sock and realize it's all messed. Sigh.

Evening update: turns out that the needles I may have used were larger than I thought because of a sorting issue. Anyhoo, Spike is literally trying to climb walls right now and window edging so I need to go. I've started the socks, here's hoping.