Laceweight wool is damn near impossible to find in New Zealand. We call it 2-ply. Fingering wool is what we call 3 or 4-ply. I am wondering about buying some 3-ply to use for lace. I realise anything can be lace depending on the stitches used and needle size, but what would you think about using 3-ply for standard lace - e.
I do not profess to be an expert of any sort; somebody with more knowledge than I will probably give you a better answer than me. But what I thought was if you can compare yarn weights not the thickness, but the actual weight , maybe that would help. What I did was to take the yarn weights yards per pound of the top four yarns—cobweb, lace, baby, and fingering—and divide their yards per pound by 16 to give me the yards per ounce. Cobweb: the yds. Lace: yds. Baby: yds. Fingering: yds.
I hope this may be of some help, and that my calculations are correct. I would think you could use the 3 ply for lace. Actually 3-ply is often called baby here, but baby can be 4- or 2-ply also I think. So complicated… I will give it a go anyway. Thanks cookworm for doing all that math in reply to a post! I have the victorian lace today book, and most of the patterns actually call for yarn a little heavier than most laceweight yarns. You should be fine. There is some overlap between light fingering weights and laceweights.
There are yarns labeled laceweight Icelandic laceweight comes to mind that are almost fingering and fingering weight yarns that are close to laceweight. I use the yardage per weight system also to evaluate yarns that I am considering purchasing online.
It is not perfect because some fibers are heavier than others. There can be a tremendous difference between different laceweights also. For instance I knit a shawl that was designed for Icelandic laceweight with Jaggerspun Superfine Merino which as it turns out is a much lighter laceweight. The shawl is a bit too small as a result. So in a lot of cases I think you can substitute a fingering weight yarn and actually be better off as it is usually better for a shawl to be slightly too large than too small.
