Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn by Carol Sulcoski is a fabulous how-to book that explains how all of those lovely hand painted or hand dyed yarns work. As Sulcoski states, “Yet as much as we love hand painted yarns, they may frustrate us, too.” The yarns themselves are lovely in the hank or skein, but sometimes when knitted up they do not look the same as they do in the skein or hank and you are disappointed in the results. The patterns in the book apply to socks, but the principles in the book would also apply hand painted yarns used for wristlets, gloves or mittens.

The book begins with explaining the dyeing process and what the differences are and how the yarns tend to be classed as nearly solids, wild multis and muted multis. The yarns also have long repeats of colors, short bursts of colors, dots of colors, short repeats of color and intermediate repeats of colors. As you might imagine they all knit up differently. Sulcoski recommends that the wilder the color and color changes the simpler the pattern you should choose. Conversely, with fewer colors and color changes more complex patterns will show up very well. The bulk of the book is taken up with patterns that show off the hand painted yarns to perfection.

But the most valuable piece of information in the book is what to do when you get a yarn that you like better on the skein than you do knitted up. The author suggests, and depending on who you are of course, you may or may not take the time to do this, but swatch the yarn and rip back if you don’t get a result you like. The book has shown what happens when you add stitches to a row, or change needles which therefore changes gauge. These small things will cause the yarn to stripe or pool differently and may make you like the results better. Yarn stripes or pools because of the length of the color repeats, the shorter the color repeat the less likely you are to get any pooling or striping. But if the color is unchanged for much over a yard or meter you are very likely to get a stripe. However, if the color is in the mid-range or more than a few inches or centimeters, but not quite a yard or meter, the yarn may pool, attractively or unattractively depending on your taste.

I love the patterns in the book, but the principles behind why hand painted yarn acts the way they do is where I got the most value from the book. Let me know in the forum
what your experiences with hand painted yarns have been.