How to find out the yardage or meterage of your yarn
- Emily
- Oct 20
- 3 min read
Like many knitters, I have a stash of yarn without labels with no idea what the ply is or how many yards or metres there are left, especially if its left over from a previous project.
To work out the ply of your yarn, head over to my post https://www.ultimatepinupvintage.com/post/wraps-per-inch-how-to-find-out-the-ply-of-your-yarn
This blog post has come about because I have set myself my own personal curriculum to learn how to write knitting patterns. Using Kate Atherley’s book ‘The Beginners Guide to Writing Knitting Patterns’, I will be reading one chapter a week and giving myself homework and questions to answer.
Last week I read Chapter 1: Pattern Structure & Elements. This chapter goes into the elements you need to include in the pattern itself rather than how to write a pattern, such as title, photos of the knitted item, needles, yarn and tension etc.
After reading this chapter, the main question that I had in my head is how to ensure that the knitter of my future patterns will have enough yarn to finish the project?
I mainly knit from vintage patterns, and the yarn specified in the original pattern has long been discontinued. The ply or thickness of the yarn is not always stated either, so I have to do some investigative guess work based on the needle size given and the tension to work out the best yarn to use.
In the past, and is still the case now, patterns were used to advertise and promote new yarns, as spinning companies made more money from yarn sales than from the patterns themselves. As a prospective designer, I would like to write patterns that have longevity to them and are accessible to knitters who may not have direct access to nor the budget to buy a certain brand of yarn.
I tend to buy yarn second hand from charity shops or from Vinted, eBay etc, and I also buy jumpers and sweaters that I unravel for the yarn. I then use the wraps per inch method to work out the ply, but have never yet had to work out the yardage or meterage as I’ve only had to knit for myself and my size, and since I knit patterns that have negative ease, so far I haven’t had the issue of running out of yarn or playing yarn chicken in the middle of a project.
So if I’m not going to suggest branded yarns with their handy labels stating the meterage or yardage length of the yarn, I need to find a way to give an accurate amount of yarn the knitter is going to need for my patterns. I can’t just go off the gram weight of a ball or skein of yarn as even the same ply of yarns that are the same weight still measure differently in meterage/yardage.
I came across a technique on the internet during my research and decided to do an experiment to see if it worked in practice.
You weigh the ball of yarn and then take a sample length from it. You then weigh the sample.
My ball of yarn was 25 grams. I took a 10 metre sample of this which weighed 3 grams.
To work out the length of the yarn, you divide the total weight by the sample weight and times that number by the sample length.
So for example 25 grams ÷ 3 grams x 10 metres = 83.33 metres.
To see if this calculation was correct, I physically measured out the length of the remaining yarn, being careful not to stretch it. It measured 87 metres ,so the calculation seemed to work.
The yarn I used for this experiment was 4 ply acrylic, so I am planning to try it again on different thicknesses of yarn and natural fibres to see how the results turn out.
You can watch a short video of my experiment here on YouTube
Comments