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Acrylic yarn often gets a bad rap in the knitting community. Many people love it, many people hate it (so much that they consider themselves yarn snobs that would never touch it), and many people fall in between – they know when it can actually be a great choice for a project and realize there are times you may not want to use it. We’ll explore knitting with acrylic yarn in this article – and everything you should know about it.

While acrylic yarn has some drawbacks, it does deserve a place in the knitting world – it’s an affordable choice and it can be a great, washable, easy-care yarn with many uses.

In this article we’ll look at some of the important things you need to know about knitting acrylic yarn:

How Acrylic Yarn is Made

Properties of Acrylic Yarn

Knitting with Acrylic Yarn

Choosing Knitting Patterns

Caring for Finished Projects

We’ll look at all of these topics in-depth so you’ll know when acrylic is the right choice for your next knitting project.

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How Acrylic Yarn is Made

Before we dive in to the advantages and disadvantages of knitting acrylic yarn, how to care for your projects, and all of that – let’s take a quick look at how acrylic yarn is actually made.

The process for making acrylic yarn begins by melting and mixing the ‘ingredients’ before extruding them through spinnerets to create filament threads that are bundled together. These threads are then stretched and cut to imitate the staple length of other fibers before being combed and spun into yarn. In the end, that mixture of petroleum-based man-made materials ends up looking and feeling like real, natural fibers.

If you’d like to see the manufacturing process in action, here’s a video about the process for Red Heart Yarns:

Properties of Acrylic Yarn

Acrylic yarn gets a mixed review from knitters – sometimes unfairly. Acrylic yarn actually does have some good advantage that make it useful for knitting. But it does have some drawbacks that you should know about – so you can make the right choices for your knitting projects.

Advantages of Acrylic Yarn

Acrylic yarn actually has a long list of benefits. It’s perfect for hard-wearing projects that need to be tossed in the washing machine. here are some of the benefits of acrylic yarn:

inexpensive

widely-available

wide-range of colors

soft

lightweight

durable

water-resistant

machine-washable

resilient

doesn’t shrink

easily dye-able

Disadvantages of Acrylic Yarn

While acrylic yarn has some really great advantages, there are some drawbacks as well. These include: