Beginner

How much yarn is needed for a scarf?

Yes, what can I believe, maybe 3 skeins or two skeins...

The yarn consumption for an unspecified scarf depends on many things, such as how long and how wide it should be, what yarn it should be knitted in and what size needles you have in mind. But this yarn consumption thing is an interesting question.

Many times I have stood in the store and been asked which yarn can be used for a garment instead of what is specified in the pattern.

We take the example of a sweater. I have chosen to start from the pattern It's not a sweatshirt from Knitting for Olive in size M. In the pattern, it is indicated that you knit in two threads, one thread Knitting for Olive Merino and one thread Knitting for Olive Soft Silk Mohair and indicated is a knitting strength of 20 stitches and 26 rounds of 10 cm.

For an M you need 250g Merino (5 skeins) and 125g Mohair (5 skeins), this yarn combination gives a soft, warm and light material, but here we want to replace the yarn with one with a little weight and knit with simple yarn.

Then I look a bit at yarn alternatives and in our example I suggest the yarn Cumbria which has a knitting strength of 18-20 stitches of 10 cm with needles 4 - 5 mm, so it should be suitable to replace with.

To now calculate the consumption, I go to the pattern and see that of Merino, which has a running length of 250m/50g, it takes five skeins. So: 5 skeins x 250m = 1250m.

The yarn I want to change to, Cumbria has a run length of 216m/100g. Then I take out the calculator and hit 1250m divided by 216m (the length of a skein of Cumbria). The sum is: 5.78 - rounded up to 6. So 6 skeins of Cumbria are used for this sweater in size M.

It works the same to count in the other direction

We take an example with a cardigan, One Cardigan size M, knitted in a thread Lore, a lovely yarn in lamb's wool, but in the example we want to knit in one thread Merino and one thread Soft Silk Mohair instead. Substitute a thick yarn for two thin ones.

The pattern indicates a knitting strength of 20 stitches and 27 turns of 10 cm with 4mm needles and that for size M (size 3) it takes 5 skeins of Lore which has a coverage of 250m/100g = 1250m

Then we see that Merino, which also has the same stretch but is only 50g, means that we need 5 skeins of merino and then we must have a thread of mohair as well. But the mohair has a slightly shorter stretch of 225m/25g, which means that 5 skeins give only 1125m, so in this case we take another skein of mohair.

So 5 skeins of Merino and 6 skeins of Soft Silk Mohair.

Something that is very important in general, but when changing yarn in particular, is to knit a test patch and carefully measure so that the correct knitting strength is achieved.

And to link back to the original question about yarn consumption for an unspecified scarf, I would probably say that it takes between 150-200g of a soft and comfortable yarn. Then you get a really lovely scarf!

Hug / Pernilla