I think this yarn looks nice and soft, and for a great price (12 dollars for 10 balls, nylon/wool).
And then this one is alpaca. I love alpaca. I love alpacas! They’re adorable. 32 dollars for 10 balls.
And I bought a ball of this lovely soft pink cotton bulky from an ebay seller. It’s gorgeous.
Every one of the hand drawn instructions for knitting LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME TO ME and I have begun to suspect that the knitting companies do this on purpose because THEY HATE YOU!
That is just my opinion.
You need more yarn.
I have long wanted to knit the [=tags&includes=title"]loch ness monster](PATTERN Loch Ness Monster - Etsy[)…but on a REALLY HUGE ASS LARGER THAN LIFE SCALE.
WHY? Because I am not normal.
Will this burning desire ever take place? Fat chance.
If you knit with lace weight you can get a gigantic cone of yarn for a small amount of money and it goes on forever and ever and ever. Or it seems that way. I may be prejudiced, I still haven’t finished a project on anything smaller than fives, though I’m halfway through a thing on threes.
I am sensitive to animal fibers. Fortunately there’s plenty of yarn out there that comes from plants in various ways, in addition to the marvelous synthetics. I like cotton/synthetic blends for some things, too. But the fancy ones are definitely not an more of a budget option than 100% natural fiber. The most expensive project I knit was in a cotton/acrylic blend.
Laceweight scares me. Fingering weight is ok, and I’ve knit a sock on zeros. (Yes, just one. The mate was cast on, but needs frogging, because it’s an illusion knit striped sock, and I like the dominate color of the first one better as the toe rather than the dominant color of the second one. I’ll get there someday, maybe by the time the snow flies. But since I want Swallowtail done by early September, guess where my knitting time goes right now).
You are a Bad Person too. I do not need more yarn. I have more yarn in my stash than I can expect to knit in my lifetime. I have so much yarn, in fact, that my daughter goes through it on occasion and appropriates some of it, and I wouldn’t know about this unless she told me.
No. I do not need more yarn.
I need more time. And less arthritis.
YOu could donate your stash so you could go and buy more stash.
(No one is ever cranky in the yarn aisle.)
You’ve never been in the yarn aisle with me, furious because I can’t afford every color and style of bamboo. 
I made the Swallowtail and I unraveled the lily of the valley border 3 times before finally deciding to ignore the nupps. Once I made that decision it went very quickly. The nupps are pretty but they weren’t worth the headache for me.
Here are some not so great photos: border minus nupps, view of the shawl blocking. I did it in the recommended Misty Alpaca, same color even. I probably could have blocked it bigger.
I would definitely want to knit a bigger shawl in the future. Laceweight yarn is great because it lasts forever and you don’t need a lot of it to complete a big project, so you can buy something decent. My next goal is to make a sweater, I hesitate because I don’t want to spend a ton on yarn and then have a crappy sweater. I might do the Central Park Hoodie, it looks nice and warm and not too difficult or boring. I also really like the Tangled Yoke Cardigan, look at that cable!
I save a lot of money by not being willing to buy my yarn online. Since I can’t touch it, I can’t be seduced by the links further up the page. Wool, acrylic blend, plant fiber - all are good as long as they are consistently not irritating after an extended knitting session, and I can’t tell that from a picture. I’m so tactile that I’m constantly touching clothing as I’m shopping for that, too, but I can still order it online since it’s not moving through my hands for hours on end.
Now if I can just stop stopping projects halfway through…
As everyone else has mentioned, you can spend very little or lots and lots on yarn, depending on your shopping habits. If you go to a discount site like knitpicks.com, the closeout section of yarn.com, littleknits.com, elann.com, or dizzysheep.com you can use lovely natural fibers on a very affordable budget. I tend to shop at these cheap-o sites and bargain hunt, so my cost estimates are somewhat lower than some of the others given on this thread:
time/money/skill: (the times are very approximate and based on knitting a few hours a day; I never keep track, and thick yarn is faster to knit than thin yarn)
-a solid color beanie: 2-3 evenings, $5-10, very easy
-a patterned beanie: 1 week, $7-15, moderate
-a pair of thick winter socks: 1 week, $20, moderate
-a solid afghan (size huge; I’m 6’4 and like my blankets a lot bigger than me): a couple of months, $150, easy
-a patterned afghan (ditto): a few months, $150, moderate
-a patterned sweater: a month or two, $60, moderate to hard (I budget maybe $30 for sweaters, but I am much smaller than 6’4"). If you do a project that involves doing steeks aka cutting your knitting, this will be more on the “hard” end of the skill scale–if you do a project with horizontal stripes, it will be much easier
-amigurumi: 1 week, maybe $10 for enough yarn to last you for several projects (since small amounts of a few different colors are usually needed); easy to hard depending on the pattern
-baby beanies/socks/bibs: 1-2 evenings, $5-10 which might give you enough yarn for a couple of projects; easy
Some people are truly allergic to wool, sounds like you are Lynn. Most people are not, they are reacting to the harshness caused by the processing done to chemically remove the trash from a fleece. It makes even the softest wool (merino) prickly. And when each of those little prickles stab you your body reacts with a little welt that then itches.
Lynn, you maybe could try some handspun yarn to see if it still causes you to itch. I often tell people who say they are allergic to take a little piece of my wool or yarn and tuck it in thier sleeve, bra, waistband, sock and see if causes problems. Most of them it doesn’t, some it does. If you are allergic that is sad because wool is really really nice when it isn’t chemically processed.
Cisco, once you learn to knit and/or crochet you can learn to spin your own yarn so you can get exactly what you want. 
oh and be careful with the “new” fibers like bamboo some of them are very flammable and therefore unsuitable for some uses.
So you pretty much have to learn how to cast-on in person or on video, huh?
I crocheted with a friend yesterday (the knitting class was cancelled) and brought a book my wife has on knitting and some knitting needles with me. I tried for 5 or 10 minutes and then gave up in frustration and passed it to my friend. She did pretty much the exact same thing.
I got home and told my wife what happened and asked her if she learned how to knit from this book. Now my wife is a master at following directions so I took it on assumption that she was going to say yes. She said, “hell no. I did exactly what you two did.”
The book literally says things like "go over and under the left needle with the right needle . . . " and the drawings all look like someone holding a ball of spaghetti.
I learned from a book. This one, to be exact. And I’d highly recommend it.
I’ve also heard excellent things about Vogue Knitting.
But learning from a person might be easier.
Awesome, that looks like a really cool book. I’ll check it out.
By the way, your two links are the same.
I learned from a book. However, I find it very easy to learn things from books, usually it’s much easier for me to learn that way than by sitting in class. Obviously, YMMV. Once you get the hang of casting on, you will probably always remember. It only looks complicated at first, I promise it will become easy.