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Giveaway! Knitting Socks With Handpainted Yarns

by

handpaintedIf you admire the hand knitted socks that all of your friends knit but never wanted to take them in hand, now is the time to grab your needles! This book by Carol Sulcoski and Interweave Press will seriously make you want to knit nothing but socks, and using handpainted yarns is just, well, fun!

Handpainted sock yarns have captured the hearts of countless knitters. Colorful sock yarns are little gems of the knitting universe, providing hours of knitting bliss that result in a luxurious hand-crafted item. Author Carol Sulcoski, owner of Black Bunny Fibers, a popular indie fiber sock yarn source, delves into the mystery of the handpainted sock yarn and divulges its secrets, explains how to make the best of these much-loved yarns, and shows how to knit with success with 20 new patterns designed just with these yarns in mind.

Knitters struggle with handpainted yarns. How do you design projects with them versus other types of yarns? How do you avoid the pitfalls of pooling and splotching? How do you combine multicolored handpaints with other types of yarns? Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn is designed to provide sock knitters with technical guidance so these wonderful yarns can be used to their best advantage, explaining the differences between various kinds of handpainted yarn and showing how to avoid undesirable effects. Combining her handdyeing and knitwear designing knowledge, Carol shares techniques and tips to help every sock knitter turn out fabulous footwear. Fun, original sock patterns from a variety of contributors illustrate these techniques. The patterns will be written for widely-available handdyed yarns so that readers can get the same results, but readers will also learn to identify patterns for their unique yarns.

Want this book for your stash? Leave me a comment by 3.31.09 telling me your favorite sock yarns and I’ll put you in the drawing!

Looking for more knitted socks designs and patterns to keep you warm this winter? Check out these knitted sock patterns on Etsy.

Comments

  1. My favorite sock yarns are CPY’s Maizy, SWTC’s Tofutsies, and Sock Pixies hand painted Merino sock yarn. I also use Knit Picks Swish Worsted to make boot socks.

  3. I love Lorna’s (despite the pooling!) and Cherry Tree Hill. There’s a lot to be said about Paton’s Kroy too for a solid, workhorse yarn!

  7. Dear Carol, I would truely love this book, I have tried to knit socks now for 2 years! There are no kniters near me and so have been reading sock patterns trying to discover HOW to do this for a person like me with swollen feet.
    In answer to your request, I LOVE Cherry Tree Supersock Yarns. I once frogged a cuff ahd re cast on 17 times and this yarn took a beating and still looked great!
    Thank you for your kind offer. I would really cherish this if I win it and hope you would sign it. My primary website is http://www.ourchurch.com/member/h/HPA/ and I am on Ravelry.com under Halalsilks.
    I spin yarns now by hand spindle as I am quite ill.
    blessings,
    Grace in Vermont.

  11. I love Austermann Step because they are my warmest socks. But then I love the small amount of Cidermoon I have left and am hording.

  12. Koigu is my favorite sock yarn. I love the muted colors. I get my favorite handpainted sock yarns from Castle Fibers (no affiliation).

  13. I love socks!! I love a variety of yarns…. handpainteds, as well as basic solids. I particularly love yarns that are washable. I often bring sock yarns home with me as souvenirs.

    I like knitting socks toe up with magic loop and doing ‘fleegle’s’ heel.

    I’d love this book!

  16. I have become obsessed with knitting socks this winter and my favorite so far is KnitPick’s Swish DK which is so warm and soft. I have my first handdyed yarn and have been coveting this book!

  17. I love Malabrigo sock, Patons Kroy, and Plymouth Sock it to Me in the red colorway (?name). I also have started a new pattern using Berroco Sox.

  18. I love BMFA Socks That Rock, Lorna’s Laces, pretty much anything that’s spun tightly enough to be springy. I also love Briggs and Little Tuffy.

  20. Please enter in this great giveaway – my favorite sock yarn is Kroy Stretch. Thank you!

  21. Love the washability of Dream in Color “Smooshy”. One of these days I’ll score some Sundara…gotta love those colorways!

  25. I am 65 and taught myself to knit a couple of years ago. I am doing much better would love to learn how to knit socks. I have a hard time grasping the multiple technique.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]