Decoding Yarn Weights

 Picking the right yarn size can be an important step in your project process.

We are getting ready for sweater weather here at The Hook and Needle Nook. We're even hosting a great sweater knit along using Kayla D. Brant's delightful Good to the Last Frost sweater pattern. We are obsessed with this pattern and the resulting sweater!

In getting ready for this knit along, we have had a lot of questions on what yarn size to use, and what yarns fall into that range. These are amazing questions, and some of the finer points of yarn sizing have the most seasoned yarn crafters scratching their heads and shaking their needles or hooks (just hopefully not at the same time).

As always we are here for you and happy to help in picking the right yarn size!

Yarn Weight Names/Identification

There are so many stores you can go in that sell yarn, and there are different ways they attempt to convey the size of the yarn and the yardage. The Craft Yarn Council has a very handy page to help you convert some of those methods into the one you know and use more often. Some of the bigger box stores and yarn brands carry a number on their label that looks like the picture below.

Here at The Nook, we carry smaller batch dyers and companies who do not often use the number system. As it can be a pretty broad distinction as it is, we use yarn weight names.

The yarn weights we typically see or talk about are (from smallest to largest) cobweb lace, lace, baby/sport, sock/fingering, DK, worsted, aran, chunky, bulky, super bulky.

Within those categories of yarn you have everything from light to heavy. For example, you can have a light worsted, a medium worsted or a heavy worsted.

With all these distinctions, how can you make sure you have the right size yarn? How will you know if your DK yarn is heavy or light? How does that change your project?

Figuring out Yarn Yardage per Gram

Fear not on all of those fronts. Take The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's advice: Don't Panic.

For one thing, projects are somewhat more manipulatable than you think. You don't have to have the PERFECT sized yarn. You just need to know how different your yarn is and in what way it is different.

The biggest trick to the whole endeavor is to know how much yardage to grams the yarn used in the pattern has. We will call that your target. Then, you set out to find a yarn with a somewhat similar yardage/gram ratio.

Typically yarn from The Nook or any other yarn store comes in 100 gram put ups. When you locate the yardage/gram ratio on the tag it will say something like 240 yards/100 grams.

Side Note: Keep in mind that the material used in the yarn matters a little bit here too. In my experience, cotton is a little bit of a heavier material in yarn. From everything I can tell from my experience in knitting, crocheting, and spinning, it is a finer fiber and is spun together more densely than wool. So for a cotton yarn you would likely have less yardage per gram. But, often if you are going for a certain look in a pattern, you want to stay with close to the same fiber content anyways, so we won't go deep into this factor at all.

Yarn Weights Relationship to Yardage per Gram

Place-marker has a great article about all of this, and also a graphic I mostly agree with on the breakdown of yards per gram as it relates to the yarn weight. Below is my modification of the website's break down:

Yarn Weight	Yards Per 100 Grams
Cobweb Lace	850 - 1000
Lace	500 - 1000
Fingering/Sock	380 - 500
Sport/Baby	300 - 380
DK	220 - 300
Worsted	190 - 240
Aran	140 - 190
Chunky	100 - 140
Bulky	40 - 100
Super Bulky/Jumbo/Roving	5 - 40

Now that I have thrown all of this information at you, let's work a couple of examples to help explain how this works in practice.

From Theory to Practice: Example 1

For the first example, we will use Good to the Last Frost as an example. Kayla Brant used Knit Picks Cotlin as a yarn for the project Cotlin comes in 50 gram balls. It has 123 yards per 50 gram which converts to 246 yards per 100 gram. So your yarn target is:

246 yards per 100 gram

According to the chart above, you will fall pretty squarely in the DK category. Keep in mind, the Cotlin might be a heavier material. Had it been a wool yarn you might have ended up with something more like 260 yards per 100 gram.

Now, lets look at some of the yarn choices you would have at The Nook.

1. Cascade 220 Superwash Merino - 220 yards/100 grams (light worsted or DK)
2. Anzula Ava - 330 yards/100 grams (sport)
3. Malabrigo Arroyo - 335 yards/100 grams (sport)
4. Malabrigo Susurro - 325 yards/100 grams (sport)
5. Lynn's Fine Yarn Silky DK - 231 yards/100 grams

Example 1: Breakdown

As you can tell, in this example, Lynn's Fine Yarn Silky DK works the best when just looking at the numbers. BUT the other choices are not out of the question at all.

The Cascade is a bigger yarn than your target. If you use the same needle size, you will end up with a more dense fabric. If you like the idea of a denser fabric for the project, go with the recommended needle size. Do a swatch to figure out if you want to knit the size up or down from the one you originally intended to do.

If you don't want the fabric to be more dense than the sample the pattern uses, go up a needle size or 2. Again, you'll want to swatch to adjust the size you might want to make.

The Susurro, Arroyo, and Ava are both smaller yarns than your target. Therefore, if you use the same needle size you will get a slightly more airy fabric. In the case of this particular sweater, I would say that the recommended needle size of US 4 would be great with these yarns. Again, making a swatch on this will help you gauge how good of a fit it is. In making a sweater a swatch is key.

From Theory to Practice: Example 2

In the previous example, you would definitely need to make a swatch. Sweaters can be finicky and should fit well, so swatching is vital. Picking the right yarn size only helps so much here, swatching has to take you the rest of the way.

For this example we will use something that doesn't need a swatch, the Brookside Shawl by Emily Wood. The yarn used was Sweet Georgia Yarns Tough Love Sock. This is a great example, because that particular yarn comes in 115 gram put ups. So how would you figure it out in this case?

The yarn is 425 yards/115 grams. In this case, I would divide the 425 by 111 to figure out how much yardage is in one single gram. Your target in this case would be 3.82 yards per gram. If you really wanted to convert this back into yards per 100 gram, multiply the 3.82 by 100. You'd get 382 yards per 100 Grams which is a heavy fingering or light sport weight yarn.

Here are some of the options you would have at The Nook:

1. Malabrigo Mechita - 420 Yards/100 Gram
2. Malabrigo Arroyo- 335 Yards/100 Gram
3. Lyrical Fibers Rocking Sock - 440 yards/100 Gram
4. Trilogy Yarns Plush Fingering - 450 yards/100 Gram
5. Gracelynn Wool Everyday - 400 yard/ 100 gram

Example 2: Breakdown

As you can tell by this example, all but one of these are fingering weight, as is the yarn used in the pattern. However, the yarn in the pattern is heavier than most other fingering weight yarns. In my experience, the smaller the yarn, the greater your margin it. Any of the fingering weight yarns in this category would work. They are off by about 20 - 70 yards off, but most of them are going to knit the same and that is why they are in the same category.

If you want a more dense fabric, use the same needle size with the Arroyo. If you like the look of the fabric, as far as density goes, go up a size in needles, keeping in mind it will make the scarf wider, and you may need more yarn to reach the correct length.

The Take Away: Picking the Right Yarn Size

The long and short of it is, figure out how many yards per gram your pattern yarn calls for. Decide what category of yarn it is in, and where it falls in that range. Is it light, medium, heavy? Then, find a yarn that is in that category or close to that category.

For instance, if it is a light worsted (220 yards/100 Grams), you can use anything from a heavy DK to a Worsted and be safe. If it is a Medium DK (260 Yards/100 Grams) you will be safe with a heavy Sport, DK of any kind, or a light worsted.

The closer you can get to the size used in your yarn target, the less you have to adjust needle size or pattern size options. However, those things can be adjusted with the help of knowing how different your yarn is from your target.