Yardage estimator
Every stitch is counted, so the yarn can be too. Crochet ten stitches, unravel them, measure the yarn, and the rest is multiplication.
The ball you are buying
Everything below is worked against one ball, so this is the first thing to change. The figures are prefilled with a common worsted ball; the band on your own yarn gives the two numbers, and the price is whatever you pay in whatever you pay it in.
- 622
- 29
- 2
A pattern from this site
| Yarn | g | m | Balls | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warm tan — the stemscrapsthe pattern does not put a number on it | — | — | — | — |
| Chestnut brown — the capsmall amount, about 15 m | 7.5 | 15.0 | 1 | — |
| Oatmeal beige — the nutabout 25 m | 12.5 | 25.0 | 1 | — |
| Moss green — the oak leafscrapsthe pattern does not put a number on it | — | — | — | — |
| Totalover 2 of 4 lines | 20 | 40.0 | 2 | — |
Measure it yourself
| Metres | — |
|---|---|
| Yards | — |
| Grams, on the ball above | — |
| Balls of one colour | — |
| Cost of the yarn used | — |
Worked in several colours, the ball count here is low: it divides one total by one ball, where the table above rounds each colour up separately.
How much yarn, and what it costs
Describe the ball you buy — its weight, its length and its price — and this turns a pattern into grams, metres, whole balls and money. Pick a pattern from this site and it works from the amounts the record states; measure how much yarn one of your own stitches eats and it works from that instead, for any project at all.
What the stated amounts are, and are not
Only one of the two number columns in the first table comes off the record. A pattern states an amount in grams or in metres, never reliably in both, so the other column is worked out from the ball you described at the top; the column headed “as the pattern states it” is what the record actually says, word for word, and it is there so the two can be told apart. The stated figure was drafted from the design — from the piece count, the round counts and the colour each piece is worked in — and not weighed off a finished object, because nobody here has made one. Treat it as the drafter's estimate carried through your arithmetic, and buy a little over on anything that matters.
They are also uneven, which is worth knowing before you trust a total. Across the 113 patterns there are 424 yarn lines: 169 state a weight in grams, 97 state a length in metres and nothing else, and 158 put no number on it at all — they say “scraps”, or name a skein without saying how much of it. A line like that prints the words the record uses, stays out of every total, and the total says how many lines it managed to cover.
Per pattern that comes out as 48 where every line carries a number, 41 where some do, and 24 where none do. On that last group the first table can tell you nothing, and it says so rather than filling the gap.
One rule is worth stating because it changes what you see. A figure that names the ball rather than the amount worked — “about two 50 g balls”, “half a 100 g ball”, “2 × 100 g skeins” — is discarded, because reading it as an amount used would turn a shopping list into a measurement. Where that leaves a line with nothing, it counts as a line with nothing.
Measuring your yarn per stitch
The second half of the tool needs one number this site cannot give you: the length of yarn a single crochet eats. It moves with the yarn, the hook and how hard you pull, so no constant here would be true of your hands, and there is no default in that box for exactly that reason.
- 1 — Work ten single crochet in the yarn and hook you mean to use, at the tension you actually crochet at.
- 2 — Pull them back out. The yarn that comes free is the yarn those ten stitches took.
- 3 — Straighten it against a ruler without stretching it, and read the length in centimetres.
- 4 — Divide by ten. That is your yarn per stitch, and it is the only figure in this tool that came off a ruler.
Then the arithmetic is one line. Say those ten straightened out to 44 cm, so 4.4 cm a stitch — your figure, not one this site can supply. A project of 728 stitches, which is the middle of this library, takes 728 × 4.4 ÷ 100 = 32.0 m, or about 35 yards. On a 100 g / 200 m ball that is 16 g, so one ball, with room to spare.
Stitch counts across this library run from 30 (Make a chain) to 5368 (Leg warmers), with a median of 728 and a mean of 1051. A count is every stitch in every piece, each piece counted as many times as the pattern says to make it — both flippers, all ten teeth.
Why it rounds up to whole balls
Rounding up is a decision the tool makes rather than arithmetic it performs, so it is worth stating. Yarn is dyed in lots, and two balls of one colour from different lots do not always match; a seam where the lot changes shows in daylight even when it did not under a lamp. Running short a metre from the end costs more than a part-used ball does.
Each colour rounds up on its own, never on the total. Summing four colours and dividing once would say one ball covers a four-colour piece, which is true of the weight and false of the yarn. Where a line carries no number, the colour is still a ball you have to own; the count leaves it out because there is nothing to count, not because it is free.
Metres, yards and grams
The page is called yardage and most of the people reading it think in metres, so both are printed and neither is converted away. One metre is 1.0936 yards. Grams and metres are not interchangeable in general — they are related only through the ball you named at the top — which is why changing the ball changes every column at once.
A band that gives a length per ball is worth more here than one that gives only a weight, because length is what a stitch consumes. Where the band gives both, use both: that pair is what turns one measured stitch into a price.
The other two instruments
Stitch counts are what this tool spends, and the same counts answer two other questions. How large the finished piece comes out at your own tension is the gauge calculator; whether a run of counts lies flat, walls up or ruffles is the chart generator, which draws the round and reads its shape. Neither of them costs anything to run and neither wants an account.
What every check on this site can and cannot establish about a pattern before it is published is set out on how we check. Nothing in this page's arithmetic leaves your browser.