This week, I’m sharing my knitting explorations with Bamboo Pop Sock yarn and what I discovered about this yarn as it flowed through my fingers and into the stitches on my needles. I’ll also share 2 patterns I designed and look at other available free patterns.
The Overcast colorway of Bamboo Pop sock is a blend of warm grays, white and black.
If you have any allergic reactions to animal fibers, if you’re vegan, or if you like plant-based fibers, Bamboo Pop Sock is an excellent alternative for knitting and crochet. Each ball of this yarn comes in 3.5oz [100g] amounts and the yardage is excellent: 492 yards! This is enough to make a pair of men’s size 11 socks that go up to the calves.
The yarn is spun out of cotton, rayon made from bamboo, and PBT (a lycra-like human-made polymer). The PBT is a natural UV-ray blocker, and much summer wear and sportswear is now being made from this fiber because it’s lightweight, quite stretchy, but not clingy. In Bamboo Pop Sock it adds the elasticity needed to make socks stay up, and to make garments drape with grace.
The structure of Bamboo Pop Sock gives it excellent elasticity for a plant-fiber yarn.
I’ll show you a close-up of the yarn’s architecture, or how it is spun. Bamboo Pop Sock is a 4-ply yarn. There are 2 plies in which each ply consists of a strand of PBT and many blended bamboo and cotton filaments that are spun with an S-twist and look like a barber-pole swirl. The PBT is semi-transparent, but basically looks white; it’s so fine that it doesn’t affect the color of the yarn at all. The bamboo adds sheen to the yarn. Then these 2 plies are also spun together with an S-twist. The two barber-pole twisted plies together have a lovely bouclé finish with the sheen making the yarn quite exquisite.
This is the colorway Wildflowers, and it captures the hues of a summer sky over a meadow of blossoms.
Bamboo Pop Sock yarn comes in 16 self-striping colorways. 8 of them have a painted or speckled appearance and the other 8 consists of 6 colors that work into both wide and pin-stripe bands as you knit.
This is the High Tide colorway of Bamboo Pop Sock and the colors are reminiscent of a beach at sunset.
The yarn on the balls of Bamboo Pop Sock is wound on to resemble a hand-wound ball that was prevalent before ball-winders were a common item in a knitter’s toolkit. While this put-up is great for showing off all the color bands that are in a colorway, it’s a slight drawback because this very slippery yarn is quick to tangle as the wraps come off the ball in bunches. I’m guessing it’s wound like this to avoid overstretching the PBT strands before you even get a chance to knit with it, and therefore to preserve elasticity. To avoid frustration, I would suggest re-wrapping this yarn with a ball winder or by hand without stretching it or adding tension.
To wrap things up today, I want to end with a great feature of this yarn…its care. Bamboo Pop Sock is machine washable in cool water. The label does suggest that you lay the knit items flat to dry rather than tossing them into a dryer. Tomorrow we’ll look at some free patterns that really benefit from the colors and elasticity of this yarn.
The stripes in deep purple, lavender and white are enhanced by white and gray speckles on this colorway of Bamboo Pop Sock called Florals.
