Yarn allergy
Welcome to Yarn allergy, episode 57 of The Ordinary Knitter, the knitting podcast that’s (mostly) about the projects. Find it on iTunes through your podcast app or subscribe via the feed link on the right hand bar (https://www.theordinaryknitter.net/feed/podcast). My name is Heather and I’m @theordknitter on Twitter, @theordinaryknitter on Instagram and @ordinaryknitting on Ravelry.
This week: the Chinese Waitress cast-on, Spikelets Cowl, Knit One Post One and good bad news with related retail opportunity. This week’s episode is V E R Y L O U D for some reason, but then one of my bugbears is podcasts that are barely audible, so just turn the volume down on me if it’s too shouty.
Featured knitting patterns:
Featured knitting tutorials:
Yarn allergy
Stash for sale or trade: https://www.ravelry.com/people/OrdinaryKnitting/stash/trade There’s absolutely masses of yarn there, some of them in big enough quantities for a jumper or two.
Are there certain fibres you don’t get on with? An allergy to wool is pretty common, mainly due to the lanolin content. It does wonders for some people’s skin and completely the opposite for others’. I haven’t been able to wear wool for decades, but I have knitted items with it as it doesn’t irritate my hands, or at least it didn’t. It’s a little while since I last knitted with it, and in the meantime I have developed an allergy to acrylic yarn. This is a right royal pain in the arse as much of my stash is acrylic.
I know there’s not much love for acrylic yarn out there, but as well as being affordable it’s a good substitute for wool in terms of knitting texture. I’d previously considered it a yarn no-one could be allergic to and so safe for anyone, but the merest bit of research has returned a huge amount of data on allergy to acrylic and other man-made fibres.
So what do you do if you develop an allergy to a fibre you use frequently? The simple answer to that is to stop using it, but what do you replace it with? As I discuss in the pod, I’ve taken to wearing hypo-allergenic nitrile gloves but I don’t think this is a sensible long-term solution. As I have projects on the go I’ll continue them with the gloves, but I think the only solution for me is to ditch my acrylic stash and replace it with cotton and bamboo. What bothers me is that this could seriously restrict the type of projects I can knit as cotton and bamboo aren’t the right texture for just anything. For now I’ll just have to see what makes sense as projects come up.
Music credit:
“Carpe Diem” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/