Standing at a booth with a pattern in one hand and a skein you love in the other? Work out how many skeins you actually need — and whether the swap is a sensible one — before you get to the register.
Copy these numbers from the pattern and from the ball band of the yarn it was written for.
All of this is on the ball band. If you are at the festival, the vendor can tell you anything the band leaves out.
Quantity is arithmetic and reliable. Compatibility is a warning system — the swatch is the final word.
Patterns are really asking for a total length of yarn. Two yarns that both say “100g” can differ by hundreds of metres, so we convert your requirement into length and then back into whole skeins — always rounding up.
Length per 100g is the single most useful number on a ball band. Together with the weight category and the label gauge it tells you whether two yarns are genuinely similar or just filed under the same name.
Fibre content, ply construction and your own tension all change the fabric. A washed, dried swatch is the only test that counts — treat everything above as a way of avoiding obvious mistakes, not a guarantee.
The Craft Yarn Council standard, with the names you will actually hear used at a festival. Gauge figures are worked over 10cm (4in) on the recommended needle or hook.
| Category | Also called | Knit gauge | Needle | Crochet gauge | Hook | Typical yd / 100g | WPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 — Lace | Cobweb, thread, 2-ply | 33–40 sts | 1.5–2.25mm | 32–42 dc | 1.6–1.4mm steel | 600–1,000+ | 18+ |
| 1 — Super Fine | Fingering, sock, 4-ply, baby | 27–32 sts | 2.25–3.25mm | 21–32 sc | 2.25–3.5mm | 380–480 | 14–18 |
| 2 — Fine | Sport, baby | 23–26 sts | 3.25–3.75mm | 16–20 sc | 3.5–4.5mm | 300–380 | 12–14 |
| 3 — Light | DK, light worsted, 8-ply | 21–24 sts | 3.75–4.5mm | 12–17 sc | 4.5–5.5mm | 230–300 | 11–13 |
| 4 — Medium | Worsted, aran, afghan, 10-ply | 16–20 sts | 4.5–5.5mm | 11–14 sc | 5.5–6.5mm | 160–230 | 9–11 |
| 5 — Bulky | Chunky, craft, rug, 12-ply | 12–15 sts | 5.5–8mm | 8–11 sc | 6.5–9mm | 110–160 | 6–8 |
| 6 — Super Bulky | Super chunky, roving | 7–11 sts | 8–12.75mm | 7–9 sc | 9–15mm | 50–110 | 5–6 |
| 7 — Jumbo | Giant, arm-knitting | 6 sts or fewer | 12.75mm+ | 6 sc or fewer | 15mm+ | under 50 | under 5 |
Yardage figures are typical ranges rather than rules — a lofty woollen-spun yarn and a dense worsted-spun yarn can sit in the same category and still differ by 20%. WPI (wraps per inch) is a handy check with no ball band: wrap the yarn snugly around a ruler for one inch, without stretching or overlapping, and count.
More than 100 vendors bring hand-dyed yarn, farm yarn and millspun to Berryville every September. Bring your pattern and the numbers from this page — dyers know their own bases better than any calculator, and most will happily wind a swatch length so you can try before you commit to a sweater quantity.
Browse the vendor listNo. The categories are deliberately broad — category 4 covers everything from a light worsted at 230 yd/100g to a dense aran at 160. Two yarns in the same category can produce noticeably different fabric. Compare length per 100g as well, and check the gauge on the band.
You cannot buy two thirds of a skein, so quantity always rounds up to whole skeins. The margin covers swatching, the fact that your tension is not the designer's, and the very common decision to add length to a body or sleeve. It also protects you against dye lots — a hand-dyed yarn you go back for in January may not match the one you bought in September.
Sometimes, but expect a different garment. Cotton has almost no memory and will grow where wool springs back; alpaca and silk drape and can lengthen dramatically under their own weight; superwash wool behaves differently from untreated wool of the same thickness. Cables and textured stitches also lose definition in slippery or hairy fibres. Treat a fibre change as a design decision, not a like-for-like swap.
That is the easier case — switch the requirement toggle to “Total length” and enter it directly. You will not get a length-per-100g comparison unless you also enter the original yarn's weight per skein, but the quantity maths works fine without it.
Yes. The quantity arithmetic is identical. Bear in mind that crochet generally consumes noticeably more yarn than knitting for the same area, so if you are converting a knitting pattern to crochet, set the margin higher — 20% is a reasonable starting point, and more for dense stitch patterns.
The gauge, needle and hook ranges follow the Craft Yarn Council's Standard Yarn Weight System, which is the same system most published patterns and ball bands use. The yardage and WPI columns are typical ranges observed across commercial and hand-dyed yarns rather than part of the formal standard, so treat them as orientation.