How Much Yarn Do I Have Left?

Maybe you're wanting to work on a new project and you've gone through your yarn stash and you've found some things, but you're not quite sure if it's enough yarn for what you need for your project. So if your project tells you you need a certain amount of yarn in it, in the pattern, there is a way that you can check. All you need is a kitchen scale and a little bit of math. And I'm gonna show you how to do it. A very, very, very little bit of math. You can do it. Okay. So, let's say that this is our ball of yarn and we wanna know how many yards we have left. So if you still have the ball band then you can take a look at your ball band. The ball band will tell you things like how much did the total scale weigh when you first bought it and then how many yards or how many meters you had to work with. So you know your beginning numbers there, that's what your label will tell you. If you don't have your label, but you can remember the name of the yarn, it is definitely worth a Google search to see if you can find that information online. Almost always you can find that information. All you need to know is how much the original ball weighed, either in grams or in ounces, and you need to know how many yards or meters, whatever you wanna find out, you need to know how many you started with. All right, so once you have that information you can weigh your ball of yarn on a kitchen scale. So this is just a simple, inexpensive kitchen scale. And you'll just check to see, right now I have it on grams, which I'll leave it on, but just make sure you're looking at your unit and you're using the same unit as you are taking off of your ball band. Okay, so I'm gonna be working in grams. It doesn't matter if you wanna work in ounces then you pay attention to the ounces on your label and then you put your scale in ounces, okay? So they just have to match. So I'm gonna be working in grams. So I'm gonna weigh my ball and this weighs 46 grams so we're gonna write that down. 46 grams. And we are trying to find out how many yards. So we'll put that down here because we don't know. We'll put X yards, okay? And then grams is on the top of my ratio. So I'm gonna put the total amount of starting grams also on the top over here. So that would be 140 grams. We'll put a little G there so we remember what we're doing. And then on the bottom we're gonna put how many yards we started with. So that would be 87 yards. Okay, so you'll take this ratio that you set up here and you will figure out the missing number, which is right here. So all you need to do is you take the two numbers that are opposite the equal sign in the middle, you know diagonally across from each other, and you're gonna multiply those together. So we're gonna take 87 times 46. Let me just grab my calculator here. So we have 87 times 46 and then we're gonna take that number, we'll say equals, and we're gonna take that number and we're gonna divide it by 140 grams. So divided by 140 equals, we have 28.58, okay? So we'll just say 28.6. So we ended up with a little over 28.5 yards. So this is an awesome way to figure out how much yarn you have left if you can find the information on the ball band. If you can't find that information, you can give yourself a fairly good estimate by just spooling off about 10 yards of your yarn. If it's a bulkier weight maybe you could do a little bit less. If it's a worsted weight or something thinner, at least 10 yards. And then you can roll that up, place that on your scale, and measure that amount. So what that will tell you is how much it weighs per 10 yards. Then you can take your entire ball of yarn, weigh it again, and then write down what that is. So let's just say for example, when we weighed it, we'll say it we had five grams when we weighed that 10 yards. We'll just say we had five grams. Then we weighed the whole ball of yarn. Let's see, and then let's just say our whole ball of yarn, we had 50 grams, okay? So we'll say 50 grams and that five grams was for 10 yards. Then what we can do is do 10 yards times 50 divided by five and that will give us how many we have in the total ball. So 10 yards times 50 grams divided by five grams equals 100. You guys probably already did that in your head, a hundred yards. So that would mean your whole ball was a hundred yards. So that way of calculating it is maybe a little bit more room for error on that because you're really just spooling off 10 yards. You'll want that 10 yards not to be stretched tight, measure it out just laying on the table to get the best reading. But it is a pretty good estimate and that will for sure help you determine whether you have enough yarn to even start your project. So I hope that you found this helpful and I hope that this helps you use up those balls of yarn that you have in your stash.