What the fiber?

I've been thinking about and shopping for yarn for the last two weeks. It's tough to shop in craft stores lately, because my little boy is usually with me and he really loves them. I made the mistake ONCE of putting him down in JoAnn's while I tried to grab something from a tall shelf. Of course he took off for the Frames and All Things Delicate, so I pulled out my mommy voice and told him to come back. He just stood there smiling... until I picked him up and then he made sure that I (and everyone else there) knew that he really wanted to go frame shopping, and mommy was being unreasonable. I've tried to go back a few times since, but the boy is too bright for me - he remembers things. I'm not sure what it is in his mind he thinks he needs a frame for - perhaps he wants to decorate his room with original photography....

Anyway. I'm trying to find a yarn for this sweater project I'm working on (the Lion Brand KAL). It calls for Fisherman's Wool, which looks good and seems very quaint and folksy. I dig it. Really. But wool is always so scratchy, and my skin can be sensitive to things like that. So I thought about doing an acrylic, but I really have never liked the feeling of most matte-finished acrylics at ALL - they just feel so cheap and yucky. The Simply Soft is one of my favorite yarns, but it really just seems too "sheeny" (might have just made that up). I definitely wanted something more natural looking, with natural fibers.

I thought about cotton. The Lion Cotton was OK looking but a little too... dishtowelly. Yeah, that's right. So I got myself pretty hooked on the idea of using Lion Cotton-Ease. It's 50% cotton / 50% acrylic, another one of my favorite yarns and it feels totally YUMMY.

Problem #1 Cotton Ease is expensive - about $6 for 3.5 oz AND I was gonna need about 6 or 7 skeins of this stuff.

Problem #2 Can't seem to match dye lots, especially with the amount of yarn I need to buy.

Problem #3 The color I really had my heart set on was Hazelnut, which of course they don't carry anywhere in Chico.
http://www.lionbrand.com/6030/PictPage/1922242133.html

 Soooo... after a week of thinking and debating and trying to shop for yarn while the baby fussed, and sifting through yarns that were too yucky, too sheeny, or too dishtowelly... guess what? I finally deceided just to get the Fisherman's Wool, which was the yarn the pattern originally called for in the first place. HA! Oh the vanity!

I chose this wool because (A) it comes in nice large balls of 8 oz. (B) the less I have to purchase, the easier it is to use coupons and match dye lots, (C) it's a nice natural fiber that I'm hoping will make the cables in the sweater really come through, and (D) the clencher was when I found it in Nature's Brown, which is a beautiful color that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

I ended up paying about $10 for $18 worth of yarn (coupons), which is way better than $42 for cotton-ease. YAY! They only had two in stock, so I still have one more ball to buy. I can already tell it's going to be a lovely yarn to work with...