Dyet Yarns: reuse, recycle, reinvent!

It’s fairly rare to discover a sweater that has the correct (in my opinion) fiber content and weight for sock yarn. Up until now, I have been of the opinion that sock yarn is the only yarn I am likely to buy new rather than recycle. I have been debating offering new skeins of hand-dyed sock yarn in the store along with the recycled yarn. If anyone has any opinions on that, feel free to comment and let me know. I’d have to change my intro that says all my yarns are reclaimed, but I don’t think that’s a major problem.

Back to the point – I found a sock yarn sweater. It was already in my stash. I unraveled it (it unraveled like a dream). It is a very light pink color yarn somewhere between fingering and sport weight. It’s a blend of Merino wool, a little Angora, and lambswool with 10% nylon. The only problem is that it’s not superwash, but I can work with that. I decided to try dyeing the skeins of this yarn (there are 4) individually and keeping a few to try out recycled yarn on socks.

I have refrained from using recycled yarn for sock yarn mostly because people have told me that they like their sock yarns to have a tight twist. I thought this would add to the elasticity and smooshiness of the sock, so I agreed. Being pretty scienficially-minded, I now wonder if I was too hasty. I should, of course, test a variety of yarns before writing anything off as unuseable. So now I am going to test how well recycled yarn can work for socks! Last night I dyed one skein a nice peachy coral color and another skein a semisolid medium blue with purple speckles. I played around with my dyeing techniques because hey, this yarn was super-cheap! I love how the blue yarn came out. Of course the final test will be how it knits up, bit I think I’ll use that technique more often!

Pictures to come once I finish the aftercare for the yarn and knit up some gauge swatches.

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: angora, dyeing, Etsy, labels, lessons, mystery, recycle, socks, sweater, thrift, wool, yarn