Another thought popped into my mind on the way home from work tonight: Is there some kind of formula that you can just plug in the needle size, yarn diameter, and stitch pattern to determine the yardage needed to knit something? I ask because it seems like a basic thing, but yet I don’t remember hearing anything about it; and I don’t know whether it is just because I have been away from knitting for a while.
In weaving, one of the first things you learn is to calculate how much yarn you will need for the warp and for the weft of a project. This is mostly because, unlike knitting, you generally aren’t following an established pattern for an item. Yes, you probably picked out the pattern design for the cloth from a book in the beginning, but the dimensions and shape of the weaving project were totally your decision, not someone else’s. With knitting, at least for me, it was a matter of following someone else’s plan completely for the first few (thousand) projects before I started to change things around on my own and draw up my own patterns. Maybe this would change some if there was already a formula that existed that, after the knitter found a yarn and needles that worked well for a stitch pattern, she could just fill in a few blanks in an equation and know how much yarn to buy for a project.
Yes, I know that there are methods in which you knit a swatch and then unravel it to make this determination, but I don’t want to have to unravel. There is also weighing the swatch to make this determination, but I don’t want to have to knit up a swatch at all! I can’t do that very well while I am standing in my LYS anyway. If I had an equation, I could just use the information on the label about yardage and suggested needle size along with whatever stitch pattern that came to mind to figure out how much to buy. It probably wouldn’t be quite an exact science, but it would at least give me more confidence in what I was doing.
I think the formula would involve needle size (in metric because there really isn’t much of a standard for US sizes,) yarn diameter (probably measured in wraps per inch to make it consistent with what is established among spinners,) and the number of changes between purl and knit stitches over a pattern repeat. I am not sure how cabling would affect any of this. Any thoughts? Am I making any sense? Am I not seeing the forest for the trees? Am I being to much of an engineer again?
I’m intrigued by your idea of a formula to estimate yardage. I tend to be a tight knitter, so would I need less yarn, or maybe I will need to knit more rows. Maybe you can try it out on a small project like a hat? I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
i think there are general guesstimates for how much yarn to get for garments, but a formula would make so much more sense. i know cables take up more yarn. at least that’s what i remember, but don’t quote me on that. i also look forward to seeing what you come up with and i really don’t think you’re being too much of an engineer.