Yarn weight calculations

Happy Saturday!

Thank you to everyone who has dropped me messages this week. My eldest got home from hospital late last night after over a week with a diagnosis of FND (Funcitonal Neurological Disporder). They’re still having seizures and needing a lot of support, so I’m not going to be in the shop for a little while yet whilst we get support in place. Wendy, Caro, Andy and Ash are in there as usual though, so please do continue to order in store and online and support us as much as you can.

Today I want to talk about yarn weights.

Most of us have come across the common terms for yarn weights such as 4ply, DK, Chunky etc. But do you know what they mean?

Following on from my Singles or Plied post, I wanted to go on to discuss the differences in yarn weights and how they affect your project.

The most important thing to understand is that Not All Yarns Are Created Equal.

Just because a yarn calls itself DK or 4ply doesn’t mean that it will be a match for another DK or 4ply. The upshot of this is that if you look at a pattern and it says ‘use 2 balls of DK’, you don’t know whether the DK you’re buying is going to work up to the same gauge or have the same meterage as the one in the pattern.

This means we have to do a few things – check the gauge and the meterage of the yarn the pattern was used for and also check the fibre content and whether it is singles or plied as all of these will affect the fabric.

yarnsub.com is an amazing website developed for just this purpose! Lets say that I had a pattern by Noro for their discontinued Bachi yarn. I can put Bachi into yarnsub and it tells me that it is a super bulky yarn which has a gauge of 12 stitches and 14 rows to 10cm/4inches and that there are 241m per 200g ball.

This means that I need to find another yarn that has a gauge of 12sts and 14rows to 10cm/4″ for my substitution.

Yarnsub does suggest other yarns which would be a suitable match, but lets say I had seen one in the shop which wasn’t on there. The gauge matches, it is also single ply, and it is a wool blend, so close to the Bachi in feel. How do I know how many I need?

My pattern calls for 2 balls of Bachi – yarnsub tells me this is 241m per ball, so in total I need to make sure I have 482m of yarn. My ball says that it has 100m/100g ball, so we do the pattern maths:

Required meterage (482m) / Actual meterage (100m) = number of balls needed (4.82)

Obviously you don’t buy part balls, so you would need 5 balls of this yarn to complete the pattern for the Bachi.

What if I don’t know what weight of yarn I’m using?

This is where my favourite tool comes in – a wraps per inch gauge! This works for both commercial and handspun yarns!

Ok, we all have ‘mystery balls’ in our stashes, they’ve lost their ball bands, they may be part used, we may have spun them ourselves; how do we know what weight they are and how to use them in a project? We find out the WPI – the Wraps Per Inch of the yarn.

Once you know what your WPI is, you can then use the table below to work out what weight of yarn you have.

*Hint* you should only use yarns with the same WPI in the same project to ensure that you don’t have differences in tension and appearance!

As you can see from the chart, there is a wide range of lengths and thicknesses you can have for each ‘weight’ of yarn. In the UK, 4ply can have anywhere between about 14-30 wraps per inch, and anywhere between 260-480m per 100g.

So just because a yarn calls itself 4ply or DK or Chunky, it doesn’t mean that you can definitely swap it for another one. Check the wraps per inch of both if you are able to as this is the best measure of how well the yarns will work together, but at the very least check the gauge on the ball bands and make sure that you would have enough meterage to complete the pattern!

I hope that’s been helpful, please let me know!

See you next week!

Nikki