There has been a real resurgence in working with hand-dyed yarns. Only hand-dyed yarn can give your knitting project colors that are not only unique but endow it with wonderful colors that can't be had from mass produced yarn. The Sock Book from Twisted Sisters is a wonderful exponent in the art of hand-dyeing and spinning yarn and teaches you the ?know how? to make your own hand-dyed yarn.



The Sock Book is a beautiful book that has been put together by Lynne Vogel and her fiber-loving friends, The Twisted Sisters - a group of women who came together in the 1990s in Oregon and Tennessee who delight in dyeing, spinning, knitting, and crocheting. It is a real color fest and will delight those who love to spin and knit with rich, deep colors that can only come from hand-dyed yarns.

The book hasn't been written for novices; the Twisted Sisters Sock Book assumes that the reader has some basic knowledge of spinning and knitting yarn. But don't be put off if you are a novice - you can easily get this knowledge from other sources - you'll love the energy, enthusiasm and shear pleasure in working with color that permeates right through this book. Even if you never plan on hand-dyeing and spinning your own yarn, you'll gain insight into what makes Twisted Sister Yarn so special.

The book has been divided into four sections.

Color and Dyeing

This is probably the best chapter in the Sock Book - for those who love color and want to understand how color is applied to yarn. It explains and shows you the different ways to dye roving, depending both on your comfort with chemicals and color definitions you want. Lynne Vogel even discusses how Kool-Aid can be used as a dye!

The book goes into details on how to produce your dyed roving for spinning and how different techniques will impact the color flow in your yarn, and how this will, in turn, look in the final product.

Spinning the Fiber

Twisted Sister Yarn is produced using different dyeing preparations and different spinning methods: the way the fiber is spun makes a subtle, though important, change in the look of the color in the finished garment. There are lots of beautiful photographs to illustrate the different techniques: used to explain each step and each technique, with detailed explanations of what you see and how it got there.

Knitting the Socks

There are many who spin but don't knit. This chapter may persuade them to start. Likewise, there are many who don't spin but will love knitting with Twisted Sisters Yarn. There are many photographs and detailed instructions. The chapter has many sock designs from traditional designs, to those with the toes knitted in as well as the more unusual, like knitting a flat sock and adding "afterthought heels."

Suppliers of Twisted Sisters Yarn

This section gives a listing of suppliers and resources.

Twisted Sister Yarn has gone from a small group of women with an acute love of color and fiber into a not-so-small enterprise that supplies hand-dyed yarns from Twisted Sisters Yarn across the States and Canada. The growth in the popularity of Twisted Sisters Yarn hasn't resulted in mass produced yarn - for example, the Mirage Hand Paints are dyed in lots of 20 skeins, and the same color combinations are never repeated. The Sock Book is an informative, collaboration from like-minded women with a true appreciation of hand-dyed yarn.