wool alternatives

[daeseage]

I decided ages ago that I was going to make my girlfriend a pair of mittens for her birthday, and recently settled on a pattern and some lovely wool yarn in red and cream. Unfortunately, I just learned that she is very allergic to wool, and I really don't want to give her a gift that will make her break out in hives! So now I need something fairly inexpensive, warm, ideally water resistant, and nice and soft, but I don't know if she will have a reaction to other common animal fibers. I thought about baby acrylics, but I don't know that they'd stand up to the abuse that a comfy pair of wool mittens undergoes, and I don't really care for working with them.

Is anyone allergic/knit for someone who is allergic and have recommendations for wool alternatives?

ETA: Thank you so much everyone for the ideas! She was willing to test out swatches (for science!) from scrap yarn as I had time to knit them, and it looks like alpaca will work for her. Those of you who thought it was the length of the fibers might be right, since the swatch of the wool I'd originally purchased resulted in hives. =[

For those of you that asked about acrylics, part of the reason is that I've had issues with using them in colorwork patterns, and also because there's a good chance that she'll be wearing these while around a stove or open flame. A singed mitten is a lot easier to repair and less hazardous than a melted one!

Comments

[synecdochic]

If you don't mind the price, linen might work well -- the issue with intarsia in non-animal-fibers is that it's hard to get the fibers locking together right to hold the color floats, but linen is less likely to have that problem. I'm thinking Euroflax here.

Barring that, if she isn't allergic to all animal fibers (just wool), alpaca or angora might work. Since a wool allergy is usually a reaction to thick-micron fibers, a thinner-micron wool like merino, or a superwash wool or merino (treated to make the fibers less pokey), might also work.

Cotton's my usual go-to sub for animal-fiber allergies, but it's hard to find a full-cotton fingering weight and cotton doesn't usually hold shape well enough to be a good choice for intarsia.

(EDIT: Meant to also say, a good way to test if the alternate animal fibers will make her have an allergic reaction: get one ball of the yarn, knit a gauge swatch, give it to her and ask her to tuck it into the palm of another pair of her gloves for an hour or so, see if she breaks out. That'd obviously be up to her if she wanted to risk it, though!)

[rivenwanderer]

I know someone who has a problem with wool but not alpaca, so I second the suggestion to test alpaca out! Alpaca isn't particularly expensive, and it's got all the lovely animal fiber properties that wool has. (If you shop for it online and can't pet the yarn before buying to check for softness, look for fine, superfine, or baby alpaca, which is softer.)