So What Is Your Favorite Knitting Yarns?

It's hard to say what my favorite knitting yarn is.

I seem to like many of them - silky yarn and cotton yarn for summer, cozy wool for cold winter. 

I'm going crazy every time I go to a yarn store. I love eyelash yarns too. They are fun to knit with, especially for decorative edges for baby sweaters or scarfs.

I like to knit in cable and patterns and most of the yarns I buy are in a single color. Single color yarns are better when knitting complicated patterns such as cable and laces because the patterns are shown better.

Types Of Yarns By Weight - Start With The Lightest Type to The Heaviest Type

Lace Weight (32 stitches/4 inches)

As its name implies, Lace weight yarn is for knitting laces and fine projects. It produces about 8 or more stitches per inches. It's very fine and soft in texture and it will melt your heart away when you feel it! Lace weight knitting yarns are made out of many materials from silk, wool, alpaca, cotton, rayon, and nylon. You can even buy superwash wool as well.

Fingering Weight (28 stitches/4 inches)

Fingering weight yarns are great for knitting socks and mittens. They also come in all sorts of material like bamboo, mohair, wool, cotton, nylon and rayon. I like a mixture of wool and rayon or nylon because it's stronger and it's better for socks.

I knitted my twins' short skirts with variegated (many colors) fingering yarns and they turned out very nice. I enjoy unexpected patterns that just seem to appear by themselves like magic.

The most popular fingering yarns these days are those sock yarns that create their own patterns. All you have to do is knit and watch for the magic patterns to appear!

Sport Weight (24 stitches/4 inches)Sport weight yarn is popularly used in knitting socks. But it can be used for many other things too.

DK (Double knit) Weight (22 stitches/4 inches) DK knitting Yarns are good for projects like spring cardigans, camisoles, summer tops, baby sweaters and other not so heavy wear garments.

Worsted Weight (20 stitches/4 inches) It's getting a little heavier with this yarn, which is fast and fun to knit with. Great for warm fall sweaters and scarfs.

Heavy Worsted Weight (16 stitches/4 inches) This is one fast yarn to knit a project with and finish it in no time. Try this heavy worsted on scarfs and you'll be so toasty.

Bulky yarn (12-16 stitches/4 inches) It's not as easy to knit with bulky yarn as you might think. The bigger the yarn, the slower I knit. I rarely used this type of knitting yarns because I don't really care much for heavy bulky look. But I have seen people knit scarfs with it.

Super Bulky (less than 12 stitches)I've never use this type of yarn. I imagine using this type of yarn for decoration and accessories. You'll need a number 19 or number 20 needle to knit this bulky yarn.

Note: I mention the tension gauge in parenthesis so that you get some idea of how yarns are categorized. I've added links to each type of yarn to Amazon.com, so that you can see the differences.

How To Read A Yarn's Label

I'm going to use the above label as an example.

As you can see from the above picture, you can find out all about this yarn just by reading its label. It's pretty much like buying a box of cereal but I think cereal is little more complicated.

What can a label tell us?

- Yarn's type by weight, its actual weight and length. In this case the yarn "medium" weight, 4 ply, 6 0z/170 g and 460 yards/421 meters.

- Percentile of yarn's components or type of fibers

In this example, the yarn contain 90% acrylic and 10% polypropylene.

- Yarn's gauge tension on recommended knitting needle and crochet hook sizes.

In this case, A 4"x4" gauge tension for knitting is 20 stitches by 27 rows on a 4mm (size 6 needle) and.....

A 3"x 3" gauge tension for crochet on a 5mm (size H-8)crochet hook is 13 single crochet stitches by 17 rows.

- How to care for knitting yarns

This label shows the yarn can be washed in warm water that is not higher than 104 Fahrenheit degree (40 Celsius degree), machine dried and cannot be ironed.

I think that pretty much wrap it up. It's a good idea to make a habit of reading yarns' labels before buying them so that you don't end up buying the wrong yarn for the wrong project.

Good luck and have fun shopping for yarns!