Knitting Yarn & Fiber

Video Transcript

"So now I'm going to talk to you about the different fibers that you can find in your yarn store. Wool has become a word that's a catch all much the same way as xerox means copy or kleenex means tissue. Wool has come to mean any fiber. When in reality wool is from a sheep and that's the only fiber that comes from a sheep. So I've knit a few swatches of the same, in the same stitch pretty much for several different yarns. So this is Merino wool. And Merino wool has nice elasticity, it's warm and it takes stitch work really well. Okay. Some people say that they're allergic to wool when reality maybe they are but it could just be that they haven't found a soft wool. Merino is a very soft wool. Okay. Then you have alpaca which comes from an alpaca goat or no an alpaca animal, I beg your pardon. And here's some stitches for the Alpaca yarn. Alpaca's a little drapier, it's warmer than the wool, it takes it's stitch definition a little differently, it doesn't pop up as much as that does. You have silk which is another natural fiber and silk and alpaca and the wool, also mohair from the mohair goat or cashmere from the cashmere goat, these are all considered protein or animal fibers. And then you have cotton which is a vegetable fiber. And a lot of people don't like to knit with cotton. It's just a different fiber and you just need to handle it differently. Like the Merino it takes it's stitch definition very well. Cotton though is heavier than wool and that needs to be accounted for when you're picking your project. You generally wouldn't do a lot of cables in cotton because it'll become really heavy. And these are the kinds of things you want to consider when picking the wool for your project because all of these fibers, whether they're protein or vegetable can come in all the different weights we talked about, anywhere from fingering up through super bulky."