Why do I need to measure yarn you ask? Well, for several reasons actually. Sure, I know what you are thinking. You think I'm nuts because I'm worried about how much yarn I have when the skein tells me on the label. BUT, what if you can't read the label or what if you only use part of a skein and now you have half a skein of Malabrigo but not exactly sure how much and therefore can't decide what your options are. If you lost the label and don't remember the weight, you can check this post.
In all seriousness, my dilemma comes from my good friend Vickie who lives in China and sends me yarn occasionally.
Wonderful friend to have I can assure you, however I cannot read the labels so the yarn has been sitting for a while simply because I don't know the fiber, the weight or the yardage. All very important things to know. :)
I wanted to make a cat bed so I went digging through my stash and found this wonderful stripy yarn:
I did the wrap trick and it is a bulky yarn, but how much do I have?
I generally do this one of two ways depending on how lazy I am.
You can wrap the yarn around two objects like two feet from a kitchen chair:
With this method, you count the number of wraps. In this case my chair is aprox 14" wide. I wrapped it around about 230 times, give or take since the yarn was very knotted and my kids were in and out of the kitchen. So let's do some math! 230 (wraps) x 14 (14" is the width of the chair legs)= 3220 Now, 3220/36 (36" in a yard)= 89 yards. Remember this is approximate. I always err on the side of a lower # because I'd rather have more yarn than I need than not enough.
You could also buy a yarn counter but they can be expensive. I went to Academy and high tailed it to the fishing department and purchased a Fishing Line Meter (click the link to see what it looks like). The one from Academy was $14.99, either one is way better than $50 online for a yarn counter!
Remember I said "approximately 230 wraps"? In order to blog about this I brought my yarn wrapped chair up to my winder. I hooked my fishing line meter to it and wound the yarn and wallah I have 276 feet which is 92 yards. Pretty darn close to the 89 yards I came up with earlier.
