not your average crochet

In the last post I told you about my desire to knit my first sweater, and you’ve encouraged me to try it!  Getting the materials, though, has turned out to be quite a problem.

You might remember that I got this lovely Options Sunstruck Wood Interchangeable Needle Set by KnitPicks recently.  I love it, but KnitPicks doesn’t make interchangeable needles any smaller than US4 (3.5mm), and I need a US2.5 (3.00mm).  I don’t want to buy any more fixed circulars — they don’t make sense when you can combine your interchangeables endlessly — so I had to hunt down something that would do.

Knitter’s Pride and KnitPro have the size I need, AND I’ve read that they both share a manufacturer with KnitPicks and are therefore interchangeable with each other!  Knitter’s Pride, however, only has 3.00mm needles in some sort of metal, and I don’t like metal needles.  The solution is KnitPro’s Symphonie needles, which are exactly the same as KnitPicks Harmony needles but come in smaller sizes!  The next problem is that nobody sells KnitPro in the US, so I turned to ebay!  There’s a seller that has what I need, and to me it’s worth the price of $14 (counting shipping and handling).  Now I’m just deciding whether I want to get the regular length needles, which are 5 inches long, or the shorter needles, which are 3.5 inches long.  The short ones might be more versatile in the future (i.e. with short cables), but would they be too short to hold comfortably?  [***EDIT: I got the longer needles, and I got them in 3.00mm and 3.25mm, just in case I need to adjust for gauge.  Once S&H was added it was about $30.***]

To summarize, if you live in the US and need smaller needles for your KnitPicks wood interchangeables, search for KnitPro on ebay and get some from an international seller.  I hope that’s useful to someone — it took me forever to figure all of this out!  That’s like 3 problems solved!  Bam!

Now, for the yarn.  I’m going for the Stylecraft Special 4 Ply (I’d need about $16 worth of this acrylic yarn).  It’s cheap, which sorta makes up for the cost of the needles, and acrylic will be plenty warm for South Carolina.  Here are the colors I’m leaning towards:

Parchment for the main color

Pale Rose for the accent color

or maybe Raspberry for the accent color

[***EDIT: I got Silver and Raspberry!***]

I also chose this yarn because I think I may have a bit of a wool allergy.  It’s making me a little upset.  When I was in Dublin I wore a lovely new 100% alpaca chartreuse crocheted hat and another knitted hat made of 40% wool, and they both made my skin itchy where they touched my forehead.  It wasn’t an immediate thing, but after wearing them for about 4 hours I had to take them off.  Then again, I wore a sweater today with a little bit of wool and it was fine…  Hmmm…

It just wouldn’t surprise me if I was allergic — I’m allergic to EVERYTHING.  My allergist did that test where he pricks your back with different allergy-causing substances, and the only thing I wasn’t allergic to was cockroaches.  Aside from being upset that I was allergic to so many things, I was a little pissed that my doctor put cockroach juice under my skin without telling me first.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far I thank you for your time.  Sorry the post was so long — I just had a lot to talk about today.  Hope you come back soon!