Using different needles and wool than the pattern...

This is my first time posting on a forum so please bear with me…

I have a pattern that I’m going to knit for Christmas (it’s a teddy bear!) and the pattern calls for 3mm wool and 3.25mm needles.

However my local go-to wool shop only has a very limited selection of 3mm wools, and not one in the colour I am looking for.

Is it possible to get a 4mm wool and then knit as usual with 4mm needles? What affect with this have on the finished product? I have a good amount of knitting experience but I have never come across this situation before.

Any help you could give would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Hi, there’s no reason that you couldn’t substitute a thicker yarn, your Teddy will just be a little bigger than the pattern. You will need a little more materials (yarn,stuffing) than the pattern suggests, but not very much more. One thing to keep in mind for toys is you usually knit at a tighter gauge than usual for the yarn so the stuffing stays put inside and can’t easily be seen. You may need to drop your needles down a size or two ( depending on your natural knitting tension- tight/loose) than the yarn 's recommended needle size so for a DK weight you may need to use 3.5 or 3.75mm needles. You can knit a swatch using different sizes and see which one gives you a good toy fabric.
Good luck and happy knitting

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Thank you so much! That makes a lot of sense and I will definitely try out the gauge and see if I need to drop needle size.

Thank you for taking the time to reply!

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Hi
I’ve never made a toy, I’m just thinking if any parts of the pattern say to work until a certain measurement, rather than a number of rows, you might need to increase the measurement a bit so that your overall size increase works.
Does that make sense?
So if it said work until the leg measures 20cm for instance adding a couple of cm more might be needed.

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Good luck and if you need any further help just ask.