The pattern called for Knit Picks Palette yarn, which is fingering weight (1 in the Standard Yarn Weight System). I looked at the 150 colors available, and they were beautiful. However, the yarn is 100% wool, and I was leery of the baby having wool allergies. Also, I've had wool allergies in the past, and I wasn't sure how I would react to knitting with it. Now that I'm thinking of it, I'm not sure if I really have a wool allergy or if I just had a particularly itchy sweater once. I'll have to ask my allergist if one of the poke tests was for wool.
(You should have seen my reaction to the dust test. I'm sitting there with both arms out and turned so the inner, sensitive bits were facing up, and the nurse poked me with four series of tests - two in each arm (over 30 tests total, I think). Instantly one of them started itching like crazy, but I had to sit there for the 15-20 minutes needed for the full test to be complete. She checked on me after a few minutes, and I nodded - because I couldn't point - to the one that was all red and spreading out and asked, "Is that one dust?" She said it was. It must have spread out an inch wide and didn't heal completely for a few weeks.)
Ahem. Anyway. Enough about how one piece of dust in my bronchial tubes makes me wheeze.
So I looked at the Knit Picks website for a fingering weight, non-wool yarn and found Comfy. It comes in 20 colors and is 75% Pima Cotton and 25% Acrylic. It's $2.99 a 50g ball (218 yards), which is a touch cheaper than Palette's $3.39 - $3.59 a 50g ball (231 yards). Since I needed 7 colors for the hat, I appreciated spending a bit less per ball since I knew I'd need a small amount of most of the colors.
This is Peapod
The one problem I saw was that there wasn't really a sky blue. There was a Seafoam, which looked a tinge green, and there was Marlin, which is a bit too dark. I opted for Seafoam, and when it arrived I was a bit dubious. Here it is nestled between Peapod and Celestial:
Looking at it like that I decided it was okay and continued with the hat. Other colors I bought were White, Black, Hollyberry (red), and Semolina (yellow).
When the hat was done, I thought the Seafoam looked just fine:
The yarn itself was very nice to knit with. I don't remember any knots or splits or anything like that. It's a sturdy yarn (it would have to be for all the tugging and pulling I was doing in trying to weave the spare color behind the stitches), and it's fairly soft. There was a tiny bit of fuzz (you can see it at the bottom of the hat in the above picture), but it wasn't distracting. That could have been from me not really knowing what I was doing for a new cast on or from all the tugging and pulling I mentioned above.
I am looking forward to maybe making another Choo Choo Child Hat with the leftover yarn or some socks. I think the yarn would make really good, comfortable socks.
If you're looking for something to do with leftover fingering yarn, you could make Knit Pick's Tiny Holiday Sweater Ornament which is free on their website right now. Check that out here.
If you can, peruse the Knit Picks website and pick up some of this yarn or any of their yarns. They have quite a selection, and the colors are all gorgeous. I get the catalog now, and it's quite the drool fest every time it comes. There's a new yarn now - Diadem - which is another fingering yarn. It's 50% Baby Alpaca and 50% Mulberry Silk, and the colors are really unbelievable. There's a slight variegation to some of them that I'd love to see worked up. There's a top listed in the patterns for Comfy that I think would look great in Diadem. The catch is that Diadem is $16.99 for a 100g hank (329 yards). I think I'll just admire it from afar.
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