Holiday Trinket: Third Time's a Charm?

Nope.

I got some new solder paste to see if it was the source of the issue:

Fresh paste.

Used the stencil to apply the paste to a new PCB:

Paste applied.

 Placed all the components:

Ready for heating.

Fired up the skillet:

All soldered in place. (I had to manually solder the
center LED as it didn't reflow properly).

And after soldering the battery holder and switch to the back side, I was greeted by this:

More than before! And alternating!

A non-oscillating circuit. I tried to apply different voltages as the supply (since during simulation I realized low voltages could cause the circuit to lock up) and none of them worked. I'll see what else I can do to attempt to debug this later.

Holiday Trinket: Take Two

Turns out it was essentially impossible to solder the transistors upside down; It didn't help that my solder paste was "expired" and incredibly runny. The method of using a toothpick like CNLohr failed miserably on the tiny pads. Despite knowing that everything was going to go badly, I still tried to put one trinket together.

I ordered a new set of PCBs with the transistors corrected and got them a few weeks later. Today I attempted to assemble a trinket again, but this time with the aid of a stencil. I ordered a simple plastic solder stencil from OSHStencils so I wouldn't need to precisely dab solder paste anymore.

Stencil in hand.

Using the same runny solder paste from before, I just had to spread a blob of paste over the stencil using the provided plastic card until all the holes were filled.

Stencil aligned and ready to go.