Knitting Confidence Part 3: Demystifying the Wall of Yarn

How does yarn weight work in real life?

Wait, what even is yarn weight? 

Weight is just a category that makes it easier to figure out how thick or thin a strand of yarn is. The thicker your strand, the heavier your knitted garment will be. (The thickness or weight of your yarn also affects your gauge, a "not-as-bad-as-it-sounds" concept we will talk about in a later Blog post!)

Here's a Worsted yarn (on the left) next to a Fingering yarn (right) - can you see a difference?

Think of weight as a spectrum from the thinnest yarn to the thickest. 

In order, it goes: Lace -> Sock/Fingering -> Sport -> DK -> Worsted -> Aran -> Bulky, with Lace and Fingering being summery, light, very fine yarns and Worsted and Bulky being chunky and more "wintry." 

This is why DK stands for "double knit"; it's typically about the same thickness as if you were knitting with two strands of a thinner yarn. We like a DK a lot here in Georgia because it is a true in-between, heavy enough to keep you warm if you're chilly but not "too hot."

If you've ever been to the Goat in person, you'll know that we personally find it helpful to group things together by yarn weight rather than by dyer. For us, we like to lay out the store so that the yarns get thicker as you go around the perimeter of the shop - but every LYS is going to be different!

How reading a label might help you

Knowing what pattern you want to make first can really help narrow your search for yarn. Ravelry is where we like to find all our patterns. When you find one you want to make, highlighted here is an example of where you want to look to see what weight you need!

You can also filter your Ravelry search by weight if you fall in love with the yarn first, before you know what you want to make with it. 

Let's look at this tag...

In a store, most dyers will have some info for you on their labels. Depending on the dyer, you may be given more or less information to work with. Aside from weight, you can look for: 

Yardage = the second most important thing after weight. In a literal sense, this is how much length of yarn you get per ball. If you unravelled your skein and laid it out in a straight line, it would go on for "this" many yards.

Your thinner yarns tend to come with a lot more length in a ball. For example, Fingering skeins can sometimes have up to 600 yards, while Worsted skeins are usually only around 50-100 yards. That's why a Worsted sweater can take upwards of ten balls of yarn, but a Fingering sweater may only take three or four.

Your pattern will always be your best guide on how much yardage and how many skeins you need, though you may need to do some mental multiplying and/or dividing. For example, if a pattern wants you to use 1000 yds total and the skein you're looking at is 230 yds, you would need 5 skeins (and would have some leftover).

Think about it like this: the bigger your needles are + the bigger your yarn = the bigger the stitches you make will be too. That's part of the reason why you get less yardage out of a heavier weight ball of yarn. It's also why Worsted yarn makes a thicker material in the end.

Dye lot: Some skeins will give you a bar code that identifies which batch it was dyed in, because there's often variation between batches. You may not want your sweater to appear to change color halfway through!

Color name: If you ever run out prematurely and need to track down more, it's good to know the name!

Fiber content: Look here to ask: does it have silk, linen, nylon, or cotton? Is it 100% wool? Non-Superwash vs. Superwash? Single ply? These things affect how your fabric will drape, the feeling it has to the touch, how much it breathes and how much it will grow when you wash it. All things to keep in mind. (We talked a little about these differences in our first Knitting Confidence post which you can read here)

Like we said, every label is a little different! This one has the yardage written in grams and meters because it is from a British yarn dyer. (We usually will convert it to yards for you on our label if that is the case, but you can also find conversion calculators on Google if you see this elsewhere.)

Looking at a pattern on Ravelry that has the material requirements in grams instead of yards? You can always break out a kitchen scale to see how many grams of yarn you have in your ball and go from there! It's the same concept as yardage, just a different system of measurement.

Do I have to use the same yarn the pattern suggests/uses?

Not at all! In fact, we hardly ever do! We think that would really limit our imagination and creative choices.

We usually pick our yarns based on colors we like more than anything else. 

It is true that not all yarns in the same weight category are the same level of thin or thick. There is a lot of variation, which can make knitting outside a pattern's suggested yarn seem a little nervewracking. 

Why "this yarn vs. that yarn" is rarely life or death

Every yarn is different, but so is every knitter - your tension, speed, yarn choice, even stress levels, all work together to create a fabric that's unique to you alone.

Even if you made a pattern with the exact materials and needles as the pattern designer suggests, you might still get a different result! 

The more you knit, the more you'll feel confident in tweaking your needle size to get things just the way you want, so you might as well use the yarn you want. There's always a way to troubleshoot & you're more likely to want to keep trying if it's yarn you really love! 

When you're starting out, you may be making smaller items (hats, dolls, mittens, etc) or even shawls, where these details may not matter as much as when you're tailoring your knitting to your size, like with sweaters. But we'll get to that next time, when we talk gauge...which is where things will get really interesting.