Worsted or Double Knitting Weight?

I’m sitting here at my desk eating trail mix, drinking orange juice, and scanning knitting pattern book pictures. I want to sell this knitting pattern booklet on eBay so I need to scan the pictures and write a description.

Don’t tell The Big Guy but I’m also feeding Andy peanuts from the trail mix. The Big Guy is on a diet and he’s super-critical of anybody eating anything that he misses eating himself.

Aaak! He’s drooling all over the carpet, I better take a picture...


Anyway, I’m about to write a description of this knitting pattern booklet for the Ebay listing and I’m trying to figure out the weight of the yarn used in the patterns.The booklet was published in 1986 so of course Patons isn’t selling Cotton Sahara yarn anymore. The gauge is 19 stitches and 30 rows in 4 inches with 4½ mm needles in stocking stitch. The 19 stitches makes me think it’s a Worsted weight yarn but the 30 rows suggests that it’s more likely a Double Knitting weight. 4½mm needles could be used with either weight so that’s no help.

So I google patons cotton sahara and after several frustrating minutes hunting through search results that are 95% expired eBay listings I get clever and google patons “cotton sahara” –ebay and the list of search results dramatically shortens to two entries.

Being clever doesn’t always work. Neither search result is useful.

But one of them, a blog written by a fanatical knitter, was great fun to read!

This pretty much always happens to me when I start researching something on the web. I get distracted when I stumble across something totally off topic and waste the next 45 minutes happily reading stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with what I wanted to find out in the first place!

OK, I gave Andy the last few sunflower seeds and, with the trail mix bowl now empty, he’s gone off to check whether The Big Guy, whom I can hear clattering around in the kitchen, will give him something else to eat. Who taught this dog to be such a mooch, anyway…

And the yarn? I’m going to take a chance and say it’s Double Knitting weight.