Yarn Yardage From Weight Calculator
How much is left in a partial ball.
Calculate the yardage remaining in a partial ball of yarn by weighing it against the full ball weight and yardage.
Yarn remaining
110 yd
101 m · 50% of a ball
Take the ball band off before weighing — a couple of grams of paper is a 10% error on a 20 gram remnant. Stated yardage is nominal and can be a few percent out, so leave a margin on anything critical.
How the Yarn Yardage From Weight Calculator works
Yarn is sold by weight and consumed by length, and the ratio between them is fixed for any given yarn. That makes a kitchen scale the only reliable way to answer the question every knitter asks two thirds of the way through a second sleeve: is there enough left?
Also known as: leftover yarn calculator · partial ball yardage calculator
Why weighing beats guessing
Yarn is sold by weight and consumed by length, and for a given yarn the ratio between them is constant. A 100 gram ball with 220 yards has 2.2 yards per gram, and that holds for any fragment of it.
So the remaining yardage is the remaining weight divided by the ball weight, times the ball yardage. A kitchen scale reading to the gram is accurate enough for the question that actually matters: whether there is enough left for the second sleeve.
Eyeballing a ball is not accurate enough. A ball wound at a different tension looks quite different in size at the same weight, and centre-pull cakes look emptier than they are.
A worked example
Fifty grams left of a 100 gram, 220 yard ball is 110 yards. If a sleeve takes 130, you are twenty yards short and you know it before casting on rather than four inches from the cuff.
The same calculation run across several partial balls tells you whether a stash project is viable. Six oddments totalling 180 grams of a 220 yard per 100 gram yarn is 396 yards — a hat and mittens, not a sweater.
Where the answer misleads
Weigh the yarn without its ball band. A paper band is a couple of grams, which is nothing on a full ball and a ten percent error on a 20 gram remnant.
Stated yardage is nominal. Ball bands carry a tolerance, often a few percent, and hand-dyed yarn is frequently reskeined and re-weighed by hand. On anything critical, leave a margin rather than trusting the band to three significant figures.
Yarn also absorbs moisture, and a ball stored in a damp room can weigh measurably more than the same ball stored dry. It is a small effect but it runs in the flattering direction, making you think there is more yarn than there is.
Frequently asked questions
How do I work out how much yarn is left?
Weigh the remainder, divide by the full ball weight, and multiply by the ball's stated yardage. Fifty grams left of a 100 g, 220 yard ball is 110 yards.
How accurate is this?
Very, provided the scale reads to a gram and the ball band is honest. The main error is the band itself: stated yardage is nominal and can be a few percent out, so leave a margin on anything critical.
Does the label weight include the band?
No, but if you weigh a partial ball with its band still on you are adding a couple of grams that are not yarn. On a 20 gram remnant that is a 10% error, so take the band off first.
How much yarn does a sleeve or a hat take?
Very roughly, an adult hat is 100 to 200 yards of worsted, a sleeve 200 to 350, and an adult sweater 1,000 to 1,500. Those spans are wide because size, ease and stitch pattern all move the number substantially.