I know math isn’t everyone’s favorite thing, but there’s one Very Tiny Math Nugget that comes in super handy pretty much every time I knit something, so I want to make sure you have it in your bag of tricks.

There’s a point in pretty much every project where I find myself wanting to know ‘how much yarn is that?‘ Sometimes I want to know ‘how much yarn did I use in this hat?’ Sometimes I want to know ‘how much yarn is left in this ball?’ Sometimes I want to know ‘how much yarn do I need to make another one of those?’ But those are all just different flavors of ‘how much yarn is that?’

So I often find myself, ball band in one hand and either a finished object or a chunk of leftover yarn in the other, wanting to know how much yarn that is. Luckily, if you have a scale and a basic calculator, you can figure it out in about two seconds.

I’m not going to type math at you here (because I’m sorry, I cannot manage to make typing about yarn math interesting, no matter how hard I try). But you can download the file over here (it’s a public post, anyone can get to it, you don’t have to be subscribed) and it’ll take you through the whole thing (including how to figure out how much yarn you used in a project where you held two or more yarns together). I do that math pretty much every single time I knit anything, so I suspect it may come in handy!

P.S. Someone is going to ask, so the mitts in the picture are Tacit (which should be back out shortly), and the hats are a new pattern destined to be called Implicit (which will be making its debut soon as well). You’ll be hearing more about them over the next few weeks!

P.P.S. And someone will also ask this, so my scales are this one from Escali for measuring larger things and this one from American Weigh Scales for measuring smaller things. And those are amazon affiliate links, because I know amazon is easiest for folks, but if I’m going to help the evil empire sell stuff I’m going let them send me a couple cents for it. But you can totally just search those brand names and the word scale if you want to find them somewhere else (which I encourage you to do)!