Knitting from a Sock Blank

A few posts back, I told you about my recent trip to Interweave Knit's Yarn Fest in Loveland, Colorado. They had a nice Marketplace at the event and of course one always has to buy some souvenirs at an event like this, right? One of the things I was hoping to find in the Marketplace was a "sock blank" to knit some interesting socks.  I had seen sock blanks at the Sock Summit in Portland, Oregon, a number of years ago, and also just recently, I saw Susan B. Anderson writing about knitting from sock blanks in a post HERE on her great blog.

Sock blanks are machine-knit rectangles of yarn that have been dyed.  You un-ravel the knit fabric and knit your socks directly from the rectangle.  The sock blanks I have seen before were knit up with one strand of yarn; as you can in the photos, my sock blank is knit up with two strands at a time.  As a result, I am un-raveling the two strands and knitting them directly into two socks at a time.  I am using two sets of 2.50 mm dpn needles (I cast on 56 stitches per sock), but this would be a great for folks who knit socks two at a time using Magic Loop on a long circular needles. 

The sock blank I found was from Eugene Textile Center out of Eugene, Oregon.

On Susan B. Anderson's blog, she is using a sock blank from a GREAT looking Etsy shop and you can see that shop by clicking HERE. 

I am really enjoying knitting these socks.  Sometimes I struggle a bit since the yarn is a crimpled up but I would definitely knit socks from a sock blank again.  Seeing this dyed sock blank got me looking into dying yarn myself at home!  I know I have to try that at least once.  On the Knit Picks website, I found bare yarn wound into hanks and also bare yarn knit up into sock blanks.  The sock blanks are rather expensive (about $20.00 for 100 grams), but the yarn wound into hanks is rather reasonable (about $7.50 for 100 grams).  I might just have to give hand dying yarn a try!

Bare fingering/sock weight yarn from Kniy Picks. 

Bare sock blank from Knit Picks.