sock knitting: the easy way?

The socking knitting machine is turning into an interesting journey.

I discovered that while cotton is nice, it's awfully splitty, and the recycled sweater cotton is mainly only good for making weird, colourful spiderwebs:
So I switched to some nice self-striping wool I have laying around in sufficient quantity to make a pair of knee socks, and things went much smoother. I'm getting really good at casting on (really!) and the wool flew along at a pretty impressive pace for about five minutes before... it threw a bunch of stitches, randomly.

So that was the afternoon. I'm going to rest my brain a little and then go back to it tonight or tomorrow and see if I can't coax it into behaving.