Have you ever heard of sock blanks? I hadn’t until my aunt Linda told me about it. She told me about it for socks, however I never really keep it just where I was described it’s used often, so I decided to use the concept for a hat.
Sock blanks is this succinctly, a knit flat panel, like a blank canvas, see where the name comes from “sock blank”? You paint the blank canvas with your dyes, some choose kool aid method, some acid dye method, even RIT would work but I will give you the skinny on RIT, even though it will dye wool, it will dye anything else too, in other words, the makers of RIT put in dye powders that will dye all textiles known to dye, because obviously they don’t know what you’re dyeing. Because of that, if you’re dying wool, you may have some bleeding so I don’t suggest this route. I digress, You paint on whatever image you want on the blank, oh yeah I should state this, you have a work surface of saran wrap to keep the mess and also you will be wrapping this and heating this to set the color. So make sure the wrap is wide and long enough to wrap it up, when wrapping try to avoid it resting on itself. Jelly roll is the best way I can explain. Once you’ve painted and wrapped it, some microwave it for about 5 minutes, this route terrifies me, I create a double boiler with foil that I poked some holes into to allow the steam through. I heated it for about 2 minutes or so, rinsed well, allowed to dry and then unraveled and balled for knitting.
When you knit it it comes out totally different and unique each time. I really enjoyed this art project!
Off The Shelf 