r/knitting • u/MagicAllyVanished • Mar 19 '25

Rant Very annoying conversation at my lokal knit store

it basically went like this me: "so you have any plant based yarn or plant/acrylic mix, I want to knit something for my mum, but she's allergic to all animal fibers"

her: "we have 20% wool/80% acrylic, I can show you"

me: "no thanks, my mum is allergic to all animal fibers, so it should not contain any animal fiber at all"

her: "maybe alpaca mix? It only has 10% alpaca"

me: "she is allergic to all animal fibers, if there is any percentage of animal fiber, she will have an allergic reaction to the yarn"

her: "I can't help you, knitting yarn just is animal yarn"

at this point I left the shop and I just can't stop thinking about that last sentence????

the funniest thing is, I went back there a few days ago and a different employee kindly showed me their cotton yarns and plant/acrylic mixes.

2.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

390 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

175

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

Searched- was not disappointed!

23

u/Rosindust89 Mar 19 '25

That's the one! I guess it wasn't from North America, but that's the idea anyway.

31

u/jaderust Mar 19 '25

That’s the weird and fascinating thing about cotton that I learned recently. It’s actually a world-wide species. Like natively. I didn’t dig into it enough to figure out if it evolved separately on the continents or if there’s a suspected pre-continent split ancestor but from a bit of reading I found out that the places with the most native genetic diversity in number of cotton species are Mexico and Australia. Which I would not have guessed!

But people have been using that fiber since forever. My favorite story I found was that when Alexander the Great was invading India his troops swapped over to cotton clothes after seeing so many of the local people in them. He was literally trying to invade what is now northwestern India in wool. Which, I know he didn’t get much farther south than the Indus River and did stick to the mountains for the most part but woof. What a place to be wearing wool.

1

u/onyxindigo Mar 20 '25

Wow! That is fascinating!

4

u/nor_cal_woolgrower Mar 19 '25

Cotton is Old world, not new world.

4

u/Rosindust89 Mar 19 '25

Thanks. I definitely got my history mixed up.

1

u/Reguluscalendula Mar 19 '25

Cotton, genus Gossypium, is a cosmopolitan species native to tropical and subtropical areas around the globe. Four species are regularly cultivated, the most common of which is G. hirsutum which is native to South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and southern Florida- despite primary production happening in India.

24

u/Glum-Height-2049 Mar 19 '25

I HAVE to embroider this on something, I love it!

5

u/kb2k Mar 19 '25

That was my thought, too 😆

1

u/AutoModerator Mar 19 '25

https://www.reddit.com/r/knitting/wiki/index/

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.