Our Yarns

Our Story
It’s a story as old as time - boy meets girl, girl mentions she likes to knit, boy moves in, boy realizes she really wasn’t kidding. Luckily this story has a happy ending. Stephanie convinced Peter that the world of hand-dyed yarn offers as much intrigue, creative thinking and browsing of the internet as being an international superspy. Van Der Rock Yarns is based in Kingston, Ontario, in a little white clapboard house.
 
Our Colourways
We love both the reliability of a standard group of colourways and the delight of an unpredictable one-of-a-kind skein, so we aim to have the best of both worlds available. Our ‘Usual Suspects’ tag denotes the colourways we’ve committed to. So go ahead and plan a bigger project using VDR yarns in these colourways. We’ll always have them. Every single skein of VDR yarn is dyed individually, so we don't use dyelots. Let us know if you are planning a larger project and we will match your skeins as closely as possible.
Our ‘Special Guests’ tag is reserved for handpaints or limited edition colourways and bases. It keeps things interesting - for us and for you.
Our colourways are designed to be used together in colourwork patterns, from stripes to stranded work. Don't let colourwork scare you - it adds interest to even the most basic sock patterns, and while your first few attempts may look bumpy on the needles, there is very little a stern blocking can't cure.

Our Base Yarns
Early on, we offered two sock bases, both superwash, with very little difference in gauge. We wanted to offer a bargain and selected our Superwash Sock base for its balance of quality and affordibility. A year on, we've decided on a new merino superwash base from Louet. It's high quality and comes from a reliable source - and one that can ship to us from within Canada. That saves us money on shipping and saves energy by cutting down on emissions. We hope you'll agree our new Super Sock base is a great choice.

Our Photographs
We use a semi-professional set up to take our pictures. Because all of our pictures use the same lighting, we hope that comparing them will help you get an accurate sense of the colours. We occasionally do some colour correction in Photoshop when needed, but our aim is to get an accurate photograph without tweaking. If you are a member of Ravelry, you can view stash photos of our yarns, taken by our customers.