So you’re holding a “double sock blank” in your hands and wondering “what do I do with this??” Let me show you how to unravel a double sock blank to prepare for knitting, crocheting, or weaving. I’m demonstrating with a sock blank dyed in a limited edition colourway called “Sakura Season“. You can find this colourway as part of our SweetGeorgia Secret Stash Club, a monthly hand-dyed yarn club that you can join at any time.
What is a double sock blank?
Now, a sock blank is a piece of fabric that’s already been knitted from undyed yarn. The idea here is that we take the undyed knitted fabric and dye it into colours we like. We can splash dye on it, scrunch it up and dip it in dye, or even paint entire pictures on the fabric like a canvas. Then the dyed sock blank can be unravelled and then re-made into your actual project. Turn the double sock blank into a hat or a shawl or part of a sweater! Then the colours that are dyed in the sock blank will be redistributed into your project. This makes the colour shifts and transitions more smooth and blended in your final project.
In the case of a single sock blank, the fabric is knit with one strand of yarn and as you unravel the one strand, you can see the colour change along the length of the yarn.
With a double sock blank, the fabric is knit with TWO strands of yarn held together. When you unravel a double sock blank, you end up with two strands of yarn that have nearly identical dye markings. So, theoretically, you could make two finished items that look almost identical. This is helpful if you want to make two identical socks or two identical hand warmers.
Now you have a couple of different options for using this yarn.
1. Knit two strands together as a heavier weight of yarn
First option, you could theoretically use the two strands held together and just pretend these two fingering weight strands of yarn held together make a heavier weight of yarn like, say, a worsted-weight yarn. You can just knit these together like you would with any other yarn.
2. Knit Socks, Two-at-a-Time (TAAT)
Second option, you could also knit socks two at a time on one long circular knitting needle. We do teach a class inside the School of SweetGeorgia called “Two at a Time Socks” where we teach how to set up and knit two socks on one long knitting needle and each sock could be knit with one strand of this double-stranded sock blank. In this case, you could unravel the double sock blank as you go and knit the kinky unravelled yarn into your socks. The kinky yarn might make your fabric feel a little bubbly or uneven as you knit, but when you wet finish your items, the fabric should block out and look a little more even. Not perfectly even, but a bit more even.
3. Unravel and separate a double sock blank
Finally, my recommended option is to fully unravel and completely separate the two strands of yarn from the sock blank and make two hanks of yarn. Wash each hank and hang it up to dry to relax the kinks in the yarn. Then, when the hanks are dry, you can wind them into individual balls using a swift and a ball winder or onto cones like I have, using a cone winder.
I demonstrate how I typically prepare a double sock blank here:
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about winding a double sock blank or what else you can make with a hand-dyed sock blank. Working from sock blanks is one of my favourite topics of all!
