A good friend sent me a message this morning asking for some advice on what she could do with some yarn she had gotten as a gift, to which I answered, “Join the Arne and Carlos knit-along!” But she said she had other plans, like knitting a poncho or a kimono. That sounded fun!
I recommended signing up for a Ravelry account to search for poncho patterns. There are so many patterns on Ravelry.com — not only that, you can search by yardage, by the exact brand of yarn you have, by type of project. It’s really a fantastic tool for knitters and crocheters alike.
Unfortunately, she said that wouldn’t work, since she had no idea where the yarn labels were. From the picture she sent me, it looked like a medium weight yarn, but it was hard for me to tell from the photo alone.
My first recommendation was to knit up a swatch. Cast on 20-24 stitches and knit until you have close to a square. Measure it and see how many stitches and how many rows you have per inch. Make sure the knitting isn’t too tight. If it is, try swatching again with larger needles. This will give you your yarn’s gauge. Once you know if your wool requires 20 or 24 inches per 4 inches/10 cm square — whatever your results are — you’ll be able to use that information to search for a pattern.
The next step would be to weigh the yarn. Hopefully, you have a scale at home to do this. (Or, you could put all the yarn in a small plastic bag, stick it in your purse and take a trip to the nearest supermarket and quickly place it on one of the scales in the produce area —just kidding! But if you’re desperate… 😉. ) Knowing the type of yarn and how much of it you have will help you choose the right project.
My friend’s question left me thinking about what else she could do to figure out what type of yarn she had, because I too had a few skeins of yarn that had lost their labels.
I learned there’s another method for finding this out. It’s done by figuring out your yarn’s wraps per inch, also known as WPI, which is a standard measure used in the yarn industry to determine yarn weights.
To figure out your yarn’s WPI all you need is something like a pencil (or, pretty much anything with a regular circumference) to use as your measuring tool. You need to mark one inch on the pencil. I marked mine by placing some washi tape on two sides of it, leaving one inch in between, like this:
What you do then, is you wrap your yarn around the one-inch section to fill the gap. Don’t do this too tightly. The resulting number of wraps is your resulting WPI.
So, for example, DK yarns are about 11 wpi and a sport yarn, 12 wpi.
I tried this with some yarn I had and I can now say I have one skein of yellow DK weight yarn and one of green sport weight yarn. How cool is that?
My recommendation even after trying this fun experiment still is that you should always do a test swatch.
Let me know if this was helpful and good luck with your stash projects!
Here’s the chart from Ravelry with all the numbers: https://www.ravelry.com/help/yarn/weights
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