Ok so I have decided to start making yarns for socks. Looking at the patterns available on Instagram, I felt that I had something to contribute with my colour sense and since I had some great colours in my store, I naturally thought, why not?

This Christmas, I discovered the joy of co-ordinating yarn colours with important holiday symbols, like this Poinsettia!

I already offer Sock or Fingering weight yarns, but these are currently all pure Merino so they don’t offer the durability that a wool/polyester blend will give.

SO I am thrilled to announce that I am now offering 85:15 Merino:nylon blend yarn base for which I will be exclusively making striped socks.

It’s an interesting and very labour extensive process to make yarns for self striping socks at home. It requires a really really long skein around 9 or 10 metres around. To wind this off the reel, you need a really big area in your studio! The yarn must be wound around a “rack” or really extensively pegged area. You could use two chairs, your kitchen island or set up some pegs in one room and wind it from room to room. Keeping the tension is key though or the stripes will be lumpy. No-one likes lumpy stripes.

Once the skein is prepared, dyeing is pretty straightforward, selecting the colours is not. Unlike my usual process of painting, you need to get the combination and proportion just right. And because this is block colour dying, getting the fibre uniformly dyed is the main challenge here.

Once the skein has been dyed, and the colour is heat-set, the next challenge is drying. Because of the length of the skein, the entire studio is draped with skeins. They do tend to dry quickly though, and ready for the next step….

Once they are dried, they need to go back on the rack! Hopefully they will fit, it’s a bit like squeezing into a pair of old jeans after they’ve been washed a few times and you’ve been eating all the cakes.

The colourways I have made are a little bit retro, because I’m a child of the 70’s and 80’s and just because the 70s and the 80s were fun.

Things got way too serious in the 90’s when music turned to grunge and suddenly everyone started hating disco and the New Romantics. For your information, I have ALWAYS danced to Disco like a silly child and I still listen to New Romantics.

So if you want boring feet, wear boring socks from M&S. But if you want fabulous feet, try making a pair of Madrigal Socks, your feet will love you for it.

Chapter 13. Socky Power!