Eco-Yarns From the Kitchen

Shawls made from soy, cable-stitched socks knitted from crab shells, gloves crafted of corn, a baby hat in bamboo, a creamy-soft scarf from real milk.

The ingredients sound more at home in the grocery store than on knitting needles, but these are the makings of a new crop of yarns with fanciful names such as Twize, Maizy, Creamy and Corntastic. They build on a knitting trend toward novelty -- but with sustainable materials rather than the petroleum-based synthetics used in the fluttery "eyelash" yarns of a few years ago.

"Knitters like natural fibers, but until recently that meant only silk, wool, linen or cotton, and cotton takes a lot of pesticides and fertilizers to grow," said Ellen Lewis, owner of the Crazy for Ewe stores in Leonardtown and La Plata, where she discusses a "fiber of the month" in her Friday morning knitting classes. "But in these new yarns, we're seeing how anything that contains protein can be isolated and made into fiber," she said.

Lewis praises a sock yarn called Tofutsies, which contains chitin, the byproduct of crab and shrimp shells. (Seafood-averse crafters and curious cats need not worry: The product is so thoroughly processed, there's not even a whiff of fishy feel or scent, and chitin makes up only a small percentage of the yarn.)

Susan Moraca of Kollageyarns.com said she began selling her first corn yarn three years ago and was surprised by its durability. "It was machine-washable and -dryable, and I saw a good market for that. It's continued to grow in popularity." Moraca, based in Birmingham, Ala., offers numerous bamboo-, corn- and milk-based yarns on her Web site. She brought samples of a milk-cotton combination called Creamy to the trade show "Stitches East" in Baltimore last fall. "It flew out of the booth in half a day," she said.

The alternative yarns are not priced for bargain hunters: a 465-yard skein of Tofutsies, enough to knit an adult-size pair of socks, is priced at $16; and 200 yards of Kollage's Creamy, enough for a lacy scarf, is $19, toward the high end of the price spectrum. But for knitters, the real yarn experience is tactile, not economic. "If you touch it, you'll buy it," Moraca said.

Small and mid-size yarn distributors are currently the prime sources for offbeat yarns. "It's a lot of work to bring them in, and I think the big [companies] are letting the other places see where this is going," Moraca said.

But Liz Shaw of Lion Brand Yarns, a 130-year-old New York company that offers a range of affordably priced wools, cottons and acrylics, said Lion Brand is "always watching to see what people are interested in. Right now we have two organic cotton yarns, including an undyed fisherman wool. And we're seeing a lot of interest in organic yarns for babies."

Even mainstream knitting publications are cottoning to alternative fibers and the go-green trend: Vogue Knitting magazine's first green issue arrived on March 25, and its hip younger sibling Knit 1 rolls out its second annual green edition on April 15.