I'm a beginner, so I'm learning a lot of stuff the hard way and one of the hardest lessons I've learned is the huge difference between using fairly 'stretchy' yarn (like acrylic, wool or even bamboo mixes) and cotton yarn.
Some cotton yarns are the preferred choice of Amigurumi experts, and to be honest you would have to be an expert to use them.
Take this head I am working on at the moment. This is a pattern I'm developing for the character "Looshkin" from The Phoenix Comic, as created by Jamie Smart.
A while ago I bought some new yarn from www.LoveCrafts.com (yes, despite the slightly dodgy name, it's not a marital aids site, it's a fantastic crafting site) and as a complete novice I added in some skeins of cotton yarn. It looked great, and as I was after something that would weave fairly tightly together for stuffing, I thought it would be ideal.
Sadly, it's really horrible stuff to work with - even though sometimes the results once you've gone through the pain of finishing off a piece with it are actually quite good (this Totoro was worked up entirely in cotton yarn):
...as was this Baymax...
The main issue with cotton yarn is the aforementioned lack of stretch. This means that if you want to keep your stitches nice and tight (for stuffing), you will end up knackering your hands trying to get the hook through each stitch / row - even if you use a fairly tiny hook.
The other irritation for me was that I accidentally ordered the wrong yarn size when ordering more to finish off. Cotton yarn comes in some extremely fine sizes, so unless you like working with the world's tiniest crochet hook (2.5 or smaller), you're going to hate working with that stuff (in the end I used the thin cotton yarn to remake the Rilakkuma bear I'd been working on right from scratch because thin cotton yarn literally can't be used in conjunction with anything else other than MORE thin cotton yarn.
As well as the lack of stretch, cotton yarn separates and frays really easily. It literally takes one mistake on your part, hooking into the wrong part of the yarn, and it's impossible to comb that strand back to looking neat again. Every single cotton piece I've worked on up till now has various snags, loops and raggedy-ass bits in it where my meathooks mis-hooked, so there's that too.
It's also more expensive than good old trusty acrylic yarn so as a beginner I really wish I hadn't spent the extra cash to buy it. In future I'll look for yarn that has that cotton-like look and feel but isn't 100% cotton!
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