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Dear Jan,

Dr. Yarn has provided us with his monthly missive on knitterly topics.  For November, we consider sufficiency of fiber and how to ensure it.

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This question comes from an alert reader in Barrow, Alaska. “When writing a pattern how do you figure how much yarn you will need?”

Answer:

This problem has bothered knitters for a long time.  Luckily, there is now a computer program that gives the answer quickly.  The program may be purchased at www.yarnstorie.com for $29.95 plus $9.95 handling and shipping, $14.95 if you don’t want it handled before shipping.

This price is a good buy as the software package includes practice patterns and some tag-end yarn for practice.  The program is interactive so you must answer some questions.

The first question is “ Do you really wish to do this?”  If you answer “yes”, the program puts you in a new menu and asks further questions, for example:

• How big is the pattern? (List number of pages)
• What size needles do you own?
• Do you have a color preference?
• Do you knit in August?
• Do you often add three or more sweaters over Thanksgiving weekend to your Christmas knitting list?
• Do you have a day job too?
• How many vacation days do you have ahead?
• Do you often find yourself knitting faster to be sure you have enough yarn?
• How many pairs of socks do you have that don’t quite match?
• Does it bother you to use remnants?
• How many 20-yard remnants do you have?

And finally, you must attach a picture of the bag of yarn you intend to use.  Then you scan the pattern in and in a few seconds the yarn weight, color, and length in meters comes on the screen.
Print this out, take it to the yarn shop and buy all the yarn they have in the color and texture you wanted in the first place. You will still likely be a skein short.

It does seem an expensive way to do it—but hey, what else can you do with your tax refund?
Dr. Yarn

P.S.  From the photo accompanying this post, you can readily observe that on rare occasion, it is possible to have too much yarn.