Home > Soy and Corn Yarns

There are many new "enviro-friendly" fibers, and hence yarns, coming on the market these days. The latest few have come from products we usually associate with food....banana, soy, corn, seaweed.

I am currently not stocking either a banana or seaweed yarn, but may in the future. Since I have yarns from soy and corn available online, here is some info from the industry about them if you're curious....

Soy

Made as a by-product of the soybean industry, soybean protein fiber is naturally a light yellow color, like tussah silk. Soy fiber takes chemical dyes well (for those of you who are dyers, acid dyes are best and it is not as light/wash fast when dyed with natural dyes) and so this yarn is comercially available in a wide range of colors. The dyed yarn feautres both sunlight and perspiration fastness.

Soy protein yarn is lustrous like silk, and like silk, enjoys a higher breaking strength than wool and cotton (tho' lower than polyester). Unlike polyester however, soy breathes and has a moisture absorption like cotton, making it comfortable to wear in the summer.

Because of the high heat at which it is processed, you shouldn't have to worry about shrinking in the wash, and because it is fast to dry and anti-wrinkling, it makes a great garment for travel. Soy has a natural antibacterial resistance to coli bacillus, staph a., and candida albicans, so some many knitters particularly like it for children's and babies garments. It is also moth resistant.

A bit of a stretch in my mind, but an argument I know the seaweed yarn makers are claiming for their product as well (and maybe I'm just too much of a skeptic) is the health benefit of wearing this next to your skin. Rich in amino acids, soybean protein is said to activate the collagen protein in the skin.

In pilling tests, soybean yarns held up as well as similarly spun cotton yarns and better than similar polyamide yarns. Because of the low crimp in soybean fiber, it does fuzz, but does not pill the way many polyamides did in the "nylon brush" test the industry subjects its yarns to.

The soy yarn I have in stock right now is BeBe Cot-Soy

Corn

Often labelled Ingeo®, which is a brand name, yarn made from corn fiber is considered the first manmade fiber derived from 100% annually renewable natural fiber (tho' honestly I can't reconcile that with my understanding that bamboo grows as much as 3 ft a day so must surely be annually renewable and it has been on the market several years now). Ingeo® is made by fermenting the simple sugar from the corn plant. This fermentation process transforms the sugar into a polymer called polyactide (trademarked Ingeo® by the Natrueworks company) which is then extruded at high force into a fiber that is spun into yarn.

Corn's properties include low odor retention and good moisture management, both making it ideal for socks. It has a fluid drape and is easy to care for. Quick drying like soy, it also has demonstrated increased soil release properties in the industry's washing tests.

I have no idea if the corn used is GMO or not. I checked treehugger.com for any position they might have as to the real environmental advantage, if any, to corn yarn but they are not certain yet how environmentally better corn is than cotton because they do not have data relating to the relative efficiency of growing cotton vs. corn for this purpose (i.d. the harvest/acre and the energy uses in growing that harvest/acre) and can't really say whether, from either an economic or environmental standpoint, it is wiser to use the corn for food or fiber.

The only corn based yarn I currently have is Maizy.

Tho' not edible, if you are interested in reading a bit about either bamboo or tencel, two other slightly exotic fibers/yarns I have available, check out this page.