Sock yarns

[cimorene]

Wearing wool boot socks over your normal socks is standard in winter. For this purpose it doesn't matter how rough or itchy the socks are.

But wearing warm and cozy socks against the skin is different. It's best if they are wool because of its superior warmth, breathability, and anti-smelly properties, but not every sock yarn is good for the purpose. For instance, the popular Schachenmeyer Regia Pairfect, dyed to make two identical socks including the self-striping Pride socks, is a bit scratchy.

Merino "luxury" sock yarns are pretty popular - merino being the finest and least scratchy of sheep wools - especially hand-dyed ones, which were so trendy about ten years ago that small dyeing businesses were springing up like mushrooms and ill-advised ugly projects made with spatter-dyed wools (it looks fine on socks but the colors do unfortunate things on sweaters and other large canvases) were similarly all over Ravelry. Merino is smooth and silky, but it feels a little like cotton because the fiber is so fine and so tightly spun, so as a result the socks are not fuzzy or cozy.

Alpaca is the best fiber to add the fuzziness to a cozy sock, but it's not as stretchy and elastic as sheep's wool. Wool socks made without elastic already don't always stay up well, depending on a lot of factors, but alpaca by itself is limper, so the challenge is how to blend alpaca and sheep's wool.

I have raved in the past about the sock wool Spøt by Sandnes, which made wonderfully fuzzy thick socks and is now discontinued. But their elasticity was so bad that they couldn't be worn out at all.

My newest socks are made with Drops Nord, another alpaca blend, which I am currently very happy with. It's 45% alpaca, so it's likely that the texture of the fabric makes a big difference. My socks are cabled, and that might be holding their shape. Ribbed and stockinette socks are the worst at staying up.

Comments

[oracne]

I have commercial alpaca socks from Pacas, and love them.

[cimorene]

Every now and then I have seen some commercial ones in a store and touched them and they always have that lovely texture. I really think alpaca is the ideal material for comfy socks.

[oracne]

I bought them last year and they are still going strong, with daily wear three seasons of the year.

[daunen]

thank you for the info! im starting to get into knitting socks for myself. I hadn't considered cables help socks to stay up!

[cimorene]

Cables have a similar effect to ribbing in some ways. They create horizontal contraction in the yarn. So you can replace ribbing with rows of cables and the fabric will act similarly - you can see patterns that have rows of cables instead of traditional ribbing at the hems and cuffs for stretch/contraction and to prevent the fabric rolling.

But cables don't all do this the same amount of course. If you have cables that interweave with each other elaborately (like a fancy Celtic knot or the kinds of trellis patterns you see on cable sweaters at times) they tend to make the fabric somewhat more contracted but they don't have the elastic kind of effect you see in cuffs. So it's not all cables, but the ones that are the most like ribbing, of course, act quite similar to it (like a pattern of relatively narrow 4- or 6-strand cables with purls in between or alternating with ribbing).

Ribbing CAN help socks to stay up and a lot of times it does, which is why ribbed sock patterns are much more common than plain stockinette ones. Even a plain stockinette sock that has a very wide band of ribbing at the top still won't stay up as well as one that's ribbed all over because the part that's plain stockinette doesn't have as much conraction to make it hug the leg and ankle, so the fabric will tend to slide down more there.

I was talking about cables staying up better than ribbing in socks though, and that's just my observations, not conventional wisdom or scientifically proven. My idea was caused by the fact that my two pairs of socks in Spøt were so different - the cabled ones basically stayed up (they had a cable on each side of the front and each side of the back with moss stitch and some other textures in between) and the ribbed ones tended to scrunch themselves down more and more the longer you wore them until they were all squashed like legwarmers and then they'd start sliding all the way off my heel and under my foot, if I didn't stop and drag them up all the time. I've since made several pairs of lightweight merino and wool socks in plain stockinette and waffle stitch and ribbing that don't stay up well at all, and these new Drops Nord socks suddenly stay up better than the last four or five pairs I knitted before them. They are made with this stitch pattern, the Ladies of La Belle socks - ribbing columns alternating with these X-shaped slip-stitch cables. I haven't tried the same yarn on other stitch patterns for a control, though, so at this point it's more of a hypothesis, I guess.