Today I thought we could take some time to talk about the different yarn weights–how to know what’s what, good options for different projects, and how to substitute yarn. We’ll also talk about plies and how to figure out what weight that yarn from your stash is that doesn’t have a label anymore. I’m going to put it in the form of a Q&A for ease of reference. For many of you, this will be information you have known for years. For some of you, maybe it will help to gain expertise in all things fiber arts. I have a few unorthodox opinions, so feel free to email me and let me know if you agree or disagree.

What weights of yarn are there?

Let’s start with a list of the different yarn weights from thinnest to thickest:

• Lace (0)
• Sock/Fingering (1)
• Sport (2)
• DK (3)
• Worsted (4)
• Aran (4)
• Bulky (5)
• Super Bulky (6)
• Jumbo (7)

The Craft Yarn Council has come up with a numeric system for yarn weights, so I put the corresponding numbers in the list above. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

What weight of yarn should I use for…?

One of the first questions newer knitters and crocheters often ask is what weight of yarn they should use for a scarf or a cowl or a hat. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for that question.

However, I often suggest using a thicker weight yarn like DK or worsted or even bulky for a first project because it will work up faster, which is nice when you’re new at it. The thicker the yarn, the larger the crochet hook or knitting needles you normally use with that yarn to make a solid fabric. That means that the thicker the yarn, the fewer stitches you need to make to get a given amount of fabric. On the other hand, you’ll use more yards of yarn for the same amount of fabric with thicker yarn.

To demonstrate what I mean, take a look at this lovely chart made by the Craft Yarn Council. It’s a great reference tool. Let’s say you have decided to make a nice big washcloth that is 8 x 8 inches square. If you make it out of sock-weight yarn, you’ll need to make around 50 to 60 stitches in each row. If you make it out of worsted-weight yarn, on the other hand, you’ll only need to make about 25 to 30 stitches for each row. You’ll have about half as many rows to make too. That means it will take half as much time to knit or crochet the same 8 inch square using worsted-weight yarn compared with sock-weight yarn.

Why would you want to take less time with such an enjoyable hobby? When you are fairly new at this, it can be encouraging to see your progress fairly quickly and to have the satisfaction of a finished project. There’s something wonderful about being able to say, “I made that” no matter what the size of the project.

On the other hand, if you want a nice summer shawl or sweater, you’ll probably want to use sock-weight or sport-weight yarn because thicker yarn will be too hot. If you want to make socks, again you’ll probably want to use sock-weight yarn or possibly sport-weight yarn for winter socks. I did have one customer order bulky yarn to make bed socks for her sister who lives in Alaska, so there are exceptions.

All that said, I recommend starting with the end in mind. What is your goal? How will the item you are making be used? What time of year will it be used? Then choose the yarn weight that works best for that goal.

I get that there’s no one answer, but how about some general guidelines?

OK. Let’s go through that list of yarn weights again with that in mind.

• Lace (0) – Laceweight is great for very fine open-work projects. Within this weight is “regular” lace and super fine lace called cobweb. A traditional ring shawl (so fine it fits through a ring) would be made with cobweb lace.
• Sock/Fingering (1) – This has been the most popular weight of hand-dyed yarn for the last many years. It’s good for socks, shawls, summer sweaters, tops, hats, and more. Many of my customers who live in the southern half of the US really just use sock-weight yarn for everything because anything thicker is too warm for most of the year.
• Sport (2) – Sport-weight yarn is traditionally used for baby garments and heavy socks. It’s sort of an in-between weight that isn’t as popular as sock or DK of late.
• DK (3) – This is a happy medium for when you want a project to work up fairly quickly but you don’t want it to be too hot. It’s good for fall and winter sweaters, tops, shawls, blankets, pillows, and more. In my shop, it tends to be the second most popular yarn weight after sock weight.
• Worsted (4) – This is great for winter sweaters, hats, blankets, and a lot of amigurumi patterns. It’s also the weight that most mass-produced acrylic yarn comes in, so if you started with acrylic and want to make some of the same patterns using more luxurious yarn, you can! This weight is common in the US.
• Aran (4) – This weight is common in Great Britain. It’s a little heavier than worsted-weight yarn and can be used for the same general purposes.
• Bulky (5) – Bulky-weight yarn is great for when you need to make something fast. It’s also great for household items like rugs, wall hangings, pillows, and heavy blankets.
• Super Bulky (6) – Ditto, but even more so.
• Jumbo (7) – Think rope in terms of thickness here. Unfortunately, a lot of what is sold as jumbo yarn is really top or roving that is normally used for spinning. It doesn’t have any twist, so it doesn’t hold up. If you buy jumbo yarn, make sure it is in fact yarn and not top. More about that later.

What’s the difference between sock-weight and fingering-weight yarn?

They are the same weight, and I tend to use the terms interchangeably. However, when people talk about sock yarn, they often mean yarn that has some extra strength for socks, so let’s talk specifically about socks for a moment.

What kind of yarn should I use to make socks?

Socks tend to be the hardest use for yarn, so you want some sturdy yarn to make them. Most (but not all) people prefer to use yarn made of superwash wool with some nylon for added strength. The superwash wool makes it possible to machine wash the socks without them shrinking, and the nylon adds strength. Other options for strength are silk and mohair. You also want to make socks from a fiber with good memory–something that will bounce back to its original shape after being stretched. Wool is excellent for that. We’ll talk more about memory in a bit. The other thing you want to take into account when choosing yarn for socks is the number of plies. Again, socks are tough on yarn, and plies add strength. I recommend 4-ply yarn for socks.

What’s a ply?

Well, let’s start by talking about what yarn is. Yarn is twisted fiber. That’s true whether it is being made on a spindle, on a spinning wheel, or in a fiber mill. If you have one strand of twisted fiber, that is called a singles yarn.

To turn it into a plied yarn, you take that singles yarn and twist it with another singles yarn. Then you have a 2-ply yarn. Technically speaking, there’s no such thing as a one-ply yarn because plying is the process of combining two or more strands of yarn together. If you combine 2 strands, it’s a 2-ply yarn. If you combine 3 strands, it’s a 3-ply yarn. If you combine 4 strands, it’s a 4-ply yarn. You get the idea.

Typically if a mill or a handspinner is making a yarn with more than 4 plies, they make a cabled yarn where you ply the plies, but we’re not going to go down that rabbit hole today.

Other than socks, does it matter how many plies yarn has?

Yes. We’ve been talking about knitting and crochet, but for weavers it matters a lot. Warp is the up and down yarn you set up first when weaving, and it needs to be good and sturdy to deal with tension and abrasion of weaving, so I generally recommend a 4-ply yarn for warp yarn as a general rule.

With a 4-ply yarn, you don’t usually see the separate plies. A 3-ply yarn is a nice round yarn. With a 2-ply yarn you can see the two plies twisting around one another. They all have their place. I prefer 2-ply and 3-ply for shawls because it’s a little lighter and airier.

Now we get to the controversial part. So far, I have chosen not to sell singles yarn because I don’t think it holds up well enough and it pills. This comes from 20+ years as a spinner and weaver. When I first started doing both, I didn’t know it would be a problem, and I remember weaving one of my daughters a poncho using singles handspun for the weft. Well, it turned into a pilly mess in short order, and I kept having to use one of those sweater shavers to deal with it. The thing about singles yarn is it is beautifully soft, but the person making it (mill or handspinner) has to choose between adding lots of twist to make it stable or very little twist to make it as close to balanced yarn as possible. Lots of twist and you lose the softness. Very little twist and you have weak yarn that pills. If you are making something that will hang on the wall or is really just to look at and not use, you can get away with this. If you are making something that will get a lot of use, singles yarn is not your friend. There. Rant over. Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Isn’t the term “ply” used differently in other parts of the world?

Yes! We’ve been using American terminology here, and I believe the terminology is the same in Canada. Please correct me if I’m wrong. However, in Great Britain and Australia, people use the term ply to refer to the weight of the yarn even if it doesn’t actually have that number of plies. They have knit, double-knit (DK), and Aran weights, and they call them by the traditional number of plies in that weight of yarn. Knitting weight (what we call fingering weight or sock weight) is often called 4-ply, DK-weight is called 8-ply, and Aran weight can be called 10-ply. If you want to learn more, here’s a fun video on British yarn weights. You’ll notice that we skipped right over worsted-weight yarn. As I mentioned above, British Aran weight is a little bit thicker than American worsted weight.

Can I use sock yarn for other projects?

Absolutely! As I mentioned, socks are about the toughest use for yarn, but you can certainly use yarn made for socks for shawls, sweaters, hats, and pretty much anything. You just want to be sure that it’s soft enough for your planned project. Where softness is concerned, I have another nerding out post about different breeds of sheep and different fibers right here.

I have a ball of yarn in my stash with no label. How can I figure out what weight it is?

The easiest way is to figure the wraps per inch or WPI. Take the yarn and a straight knitting needle or any cylindrical object. It doesn’t matter how big around the knitting needle or other object is. Wrap the yarn gently around the knitting needle loosely a bunch of times like this:

You don’t want to stretch the yarn when you do this or it will make it seem thinner than it really is.

Now push the wraps together so that the strands are all touching each other but not overlapping. It should look like this:

Now count the number of strands or wraps in one inch.

I find the method of wrapping the yarn around something circular and then pushing it together to be a little more accurate than just wrapping the yarn around a ruler. The yarn I used came to 20 wraps per inch, which shows that it is a fingering-weight yarn. The Craft Yarn Council has a chart for how many wraps per inch in each yarn weight here. However, at the risk of being a bit controversial once again, I have found that the wraps per inch is too low for the finer weights. Here is the chart I use based on my own experience:

• Lace (0) – More than 23 wpi
• Sock/Fingering (1) – 18-23 wpi
• Sport (2) 16-17 wpi
• DK (3) – 12 to 15 wpi
• Worsted/Aran (4) – 9 to 11 wpi
• Bulky (5) – 7 to 8 wpi
• Super Bulky (6) – Less than 7 wraps per inch

You might want to do the WPI test a few different times to make sure your results are consistent.

How do I figure out how many yards are in that unlabeled ball of yarn?

If you just want a reasonable guesstimate before you measure, you can weigh the yarn and use a ratio to get a general idea. Then if it seems like a likely candidate for the project you have in mind you can take the time to actually measure the yardage.

Estimating Yardage

Most yarn comes in 100 gram skeins or hanks. That is the same as 3.5 ounces. We’re going to take the chart with wraps per inch above and add the yardage range per 100 gram skein to it:

• Lace (0) – Above about 23 WPI – 600+ yards per 100 gram skein
• Sock/Fingering (1) – 18-23 wpi – 380 to 600 yards per 100 gram skein
• Sport (2) 16-17 wpi – 300 to 380 yards per 100 gram skein
• DK (3) – 12 to 15 wpi – 230 to 300 yards per 100 gram skein
• Worsted/Aran (4) – 9 to 11 wpi – 170 to 230 yards per 100 gram skein
• Bulky (5) – 7 to 8 wpi – 100 to 170 yards per 100 gram skein
• Super Bulky (6) – Less than 7 wpi – Less than 100 yards per 100 gram skein

To figure this out, take your ball of yarn and weigh it in grams. Let’s say you already figured out that you had a ball of DK-weight yarn based on the wraps per inch. When you weigh it, let’s say it weighs 65 grams. Let’s do a ratio to estimate the yarn you have. We know that DK weight yarn has at least 230 yards per 100 gram skein, so we want to know how many yards we have, right? We’ll call that unknown number of yards x. Don’t panic. You can do this!

Unknown Yards (X)	Current Weight of Skein
Least Yardage for 100 gram skein of Yarn Weight	100 grams

Now cross multiply the yards in a full skein (230 in this case) times the current weight of the yarn (65 grams in this case) and then divide the answer by 100 for the weight of a full skein. That will give us the unknown, which is the current yardage.

In our example, your ball of yarn weighs 65 grams, and you know it is DK weight, so the least yardage it originally had was 230 yards for a 100 gram skein. Multiply 65 x 230. That equals 14,950. Now divide that by 100 for the weight of the original skein. The answer is 149 yards. Since we assumed the low end of the range of yards per skein for DK weight yarn, we should have at least that many yards of yarn.

I should include a caveat here. The chart above is based on my own figuring, and it is most accurate with yarn that is made mostly of wool. The Woolery has a chart like this here and so does The Crafty Jackalope right here. Here’s another one I just found on Paper Moon Knits. If you take a look, you’ll see that each one is a little bit different.

Measuring Yardage

If the estimated yardage makes the stash yarn a likely candidate for the project you have in mind, you can make sure by actually measuring the yardage.

If you have a yarn swift or a niddy-noddy, you can turn the ball into a hank and figure out just how many yards you have. Most niddy-noddies come in either 36 inch or 72 inch diameters. If you have the 36-inch one, then the number of wraps equals the number of yards. If you have a 72-inch one, then take the number of wraps and divide by 2 to get the number of yards. If you have a swift, you can usual adjust them between 36 inches and 72 inches, so you can do the same thing.

I want to use different yarn than what the pattern calls for. How do I figure out what yarn will work?

Sometimes this can be harder than it should be. If I had my druthers, every pattern designer would say how many yards are needed for the pattern rather than just “5 skeins of Brand X yarn.”

You can still figure it out though. It just takes an extra step. Let’s say you find a fabulous shawl pattern that calls for 3 skeins of Malabrigo Dos Tierras. First, let’s find out what weight Dos Tierras is and how many yards are in each skein. In this case, it’s pretty easy. On Ravelry you can look search for Malabrigo Dos Tierras under yarn and learn that it has 205 yards per skein right here. If you aren’t on Ravelry, most yarn companies have a website with this information. So your pattern calls for 3 skeins of Dos Tierras, which would be 615 yards. You now know that you need 615 yards of a DK weight yarn. Now you can go stash diving for 3 skeins of DK weight yarn. If you don’t find what you need in your stash, you can always head over to your favorite indie dyer’s website to see what’s available.

Does the fiber matter when substituting yarn?

Yes! The thing that really matters here is the difference between fibers with good memory and fibers with good drape, which are opposite ends of the spectrum. We talked about the difference between memory and drape in this blog post from last year. Basically, memory is the elasticity of a fiber or its ability to bounce back to its original shape. Wool has great memory and some drape as we talked about above. On the other hand, silk, cotton, and bamboo have great drape but almost no memory. The camelid fibers have some memory but not nearly as much as sheep’s wool.

For that matter, superwash wool has less memory than untreated or non-superwash wool, but the difference is not as pronounced as the difference between wool and silk or wool and cotton.

All that said, if the pattern you want to use calls for a merino wool yarn and you use cotton or bamboo, it may not behave the same. If it’s a sweater, it might grow from its own weight and sag rather than bounce back to its original shape. If it’s a lightweight shawl, it won’t matter as much.

I’m trying to think of an example where the opposite would be true–where using wool when the original pattern calls for cotton or acrylic would be a problem. As far as I know, you might have a somewhat less drapey lace shawl if you use wool for a pattern that calls for silk, but it wouldn’t be as big of a problem as the opposite. Let me know if you disagree or if you can think of an example where using wool instead of a drapey fiber would cause problems.

Generally speaking, you should be able to substitute one breed of sheep’s wool for another. Just keep in mind that some sheep’s wool breeds like merino and Polwarth are great against the skin while others are better suited to outerwear. Again, I would refer you to the blog post I wrote about different fibers here.

You should also be able to substitute silk, bamboo, and cotton fairly interchangeably.

What size needles or crochet hook should I use for this yarn?

It depends on what you are making, your own personal tension, and how you want the finished fabric to look and feel. A good place to start is (once again) the Craft Yarn Council’s handy chart on yarn weights. Let’s take the example of sock-weight yarn. The Craft Yarn Council suggests using knitting needles between US size 1 and US size 3 and a crochet hook between a B and an E. Let’s say you want to knit a pair of socks. Depending on whether you are a loose knitter or a tight knitter, you’ll probably want to use size US 1 or US 2 knitting needles. On the other hand, you might use US 3 needles for a sweater, and US 5 needles for a shawl–all for the same yarn. The same goes for crochet hook sizes.

There’s also the question of tension. Are you a loose knitter/crocheter, a tight knitter/crocheter, or somewhere in between? Only experience can answer that question. If you don’t know, start in the middle of the range suggested by the Craft Yarn Council and make notes as you go.

How can I learn from my own experience?

I recommend keeping a project journal. Whether it is on paper or on a computer, you are your own best source of information as you gain more experience. Here are some of the things I would suggest keeping track of for each project you make:

• Pattern used
• Yarn brand, base, and colorway used
• Needle/Hook size to get gauge compared with recommended size
• How much yarn you actually used compared with what was called for
• Final measurements before and after blocking
• How much you enjoyed the project and whether you would like to make another one
• Any adjustments or changes you made as you went
• Things you found difficult and how you figured them out
• What you would do differently next time

I do this in an app called Trello for knitting projects, and I have an Excel spreadsheet for weaving projects since those include more calculations.

If you already have a method for keeping track of your projects, what do you use to do it? What other information have you found helpful? I’d love to hear from you!

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…And the Winner Is

Last week I asked for your votes on which of two paintings to use as inspiration for the September club colorway. The winner by a mile is Arcimboldo’s Flora, so I’ll be making yarn and art batts based on this painting for September:

This is going to be a lot of fun to design! Thank you to everyone who took the time to vote!

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Fresh from the Dye Pots

I’m more than halfway through dyeing up the Advent calendar yarn, but I also dyed some other goodies this week. I dyed Peony Pink on Sock Perfection:

…and Alpine Sky on Sock Perfection and Suri Lace Cloud:

As I mentioned last week, Peony Pink and Alpine Sky both look great with Texas Bluebonnet.

I also dyed Northern Lights:

…and Sapphire Dreams:

Northern Lights and Sapphire Dreams look great together!

For the first time I dyed Copper Penny on Stained Glass Sock. Here that is:

You can find all of these and more colorways in the Yarn Ready to Ship section of my shop.