Crochet tips&tricks. How much yarn do I need?

Every time you start a new project, the first question to answer is How much yarn do I need?

Is so frustrating when you start a new project and in a middle of it you get out of yarn. I am used to buy the yarn online and every time this thing happens I have to make another purchase and not few times I was in situation, that the yarn I needed to be out of stock.

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So I had to figure it out how can I calculate the Yarn I needed from the beginning. This method is very close to the truth and I use it all the time.

Also, after I started to write patterns I wanted to give the approximate amount of yarn for other sizes too. So this calculator is great to find out how much yarn do I need if I want to make the item in another size.

You will see that is very easy and maybe some of you already make this.

Let’s see what you have to do.

After you choose your pattern and your yarn, you will make your gauge. Most of the patterns ask you to change your hook size until you obtain the gauge, just to make sure that the final result will be the same as in pictures. Well you can solve and adjust the pattern to your gauge not your gauge to the pattern. See here how.

You can use this especially for garments, as for other items is not so important the gauge.

But let’s go back to the question how much yarn do I need? After you made your gauge you now know how many stitches you have per row and how many rows. From now on just grab a measuring tape and we are about to do some math.

If you work on a garment you will have to calculate how much yarn do you need for each piece.

Step 1

Unfold 10 stitches from your gauge. Keep your finger exactly when your yarn ends before to unfold the stitches.

Step 2

After you unfolded the stitches, with a measuring tape measure the yarn used for those 10 stitches. Ok, so you now how much yarn do you need for 10 stitches per row. To be more easy to apply this to the number of stitches that you have per row in your pattern, divide the length by 10. Basically you have now the length of yarn for 1 stitch.

Step 3

Multiply the resulted number with the number of stitches that you have per row in your pattern

Step 4

Multiply the resulted number above with the number of rows that you have in your pattern.

After that, you will know the length of yarn you will need. Just look now on the label of the yarn skein to see how many yards per skein you have just to know how many skeins you will have to buy.

If you work with 2 or more different rows, you will have to measure 10 stitches for each row and then, when you multiply with the number of rows you will do it with the number of groups of rows.

And this is it. You now now the answer to the question how much yarn do I need?

I made a short video tutorial with this method and you can find it bellow.