Spinning cotton for knitted socks

I love spinning cotton. I most often spin it on a supported bead spindle. Then on my Louet S10 spinning wheel, and then rarely, park and draft on a bead drop spindle.

I like spinning it more than wool sometimes. However, conventional wisdom is that you can't spin pure cotton into sock yarn, whereas wool, you can.

As is apparent, since we have a plethora of cotton socks mass produced for sale, as well as organic natural colored socks from smaller independent yarn sellers.

My first goal is to make the cotton socks elastic. I spin my cotton tightly, so there might be less of a problem with abrasion.

I think I have several options for making cotton into sock yarn.

1. Cotton + nylon (or acrylic, or polyester). 

• I experimented with what I had on hand, dyelishus cotton + firestar cut into chunks, blended on 90tpi hand carders. I'm at the spinning stage and plying stage, we'll see how that goes.

2. Cotton + wool

3. Plying a strand of cotton with a strand of wool.

4. A wildcard idea: Cotton + wool + flax?

I'll add more to this entry later on, these are just some initial thoughts.

-jtp/mnr