If you have a bit of yarn left over from a past project or any ball of yarn that has lost its ball band, it’s natural to wonder exactly how much yarn you have there.
It’s never a good idea to start a knitting project not knowing if you have enough yarn to finish it, but the good news is there are a couple of ways to estimate how much yarn you have.
The more time-consuming way to do it is to measure out a certain quantity of the yarn, say 10 or 25 yards, weigh that and determine your yards per ounce. Then weigh the whole skein and you can get a pretty good guess at the yardage.
If your yarn is in a hank, you can stretch it out, measure the length of the hank itself, count the number of strands and multiply by the length of one strand to determine yardage.
Or you can make a less scientific but still relatively accurate guess based on the average weight of yarn in the yarn weight category you’re dealing with, as outlined in this post from Interweave. If you know that you have light weight yarn (verified with a wraps per inch tool or by wrapping the yarn around a ruler), using the chart on that post you can see that you typically get 1,200 to 1,800 yards a pound in that weight of yarn.
Weigh your skeins and you can figure out a somewhat close range for how much yardage you have. Err on the side of assuming you have less to avoid tragedy.
Have you ever used one of these methods to determine yardage on unknown balls or hanks of yarn? Or do you have another method? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
[Photo: Interweave.]
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