Mystery yarns! We all end up with them eventually. There are ways to figure out what sort of fiber it is which I won’t cover in this post, but if you simply need to know how MUCH of a yarn you have, there is a simple tool to tell you. It is called a yarn balance. I’ve had mine for decades and it does come in handy if I need to know how many yards I have of something calculated from the weight of the ball of yarn.
Long ago in my fabric-weaving days, someone told me about the McMorran Yarn Balance. I pulled it out recently to calculate yards per pound of a tapestry yarn I was testing and thought you, dear reader, might not know this simple tool exists.
Using a yarn balance
The yarn balance is a plastic box with an arm suspended by a pivot. The arm length is calibrated by weight and swings to level when you have enough yarn on the balance to give you the yards per pound (ypp) when multiplied by 100. The video below shows you how it works.
Steps to figure out how much yarn you have in your mystery ball.
Set up your balance at the edge of a table.
Place the balance arm with the metal pins in the smaller divots in the side of the plastic box.
Cut a length of your mystery yarn and loop it loosely over the balance arm that has the notch in it.
Trim the yarn in small pieces until the balance arm levels. It is more accurate if the yarn remains fairly centered in the middle of the notch.
Measure the length of yarn and multiply by 100. The answer is the number of yards per pound (ypp) of this particular yarn.
Weigh your ball of yarn and then you can use percentages or algebra to figure out how much yarn you have.
McMorran Yarn Balance for figuring out how much of a mystery yarn you have
The math
The first part is easy. Measure the length of yarn that made the yarn balance balance and multiple by 100 as in step #5 above. In the second example in the video, the sample was 8.5 inches.
8.5 x 100 = 850 ypp.
The second calculation is one of the only bits of high school math I still use (kids who went to smarter schools than I did probably learned this in junior high or even grade school). We’re going to set up a simple ratio to figure out how many yards of yarn you have and solve for the unkown x which is the number of actual yards you have of your mystery yarn.
Remember that there are 16 ounces in a pound so we’re figuring out a ratio that tells us how many yards we have from our yarn balance sample.
The math below should lead you through it!
Using a percentage instead
If that makes no sense at all to you, you can use a simple percentage. Figure the weight in ounces as a percentage of 16 ounces and then use that percentage to multiply by the ypp you figured with the yarn balance. For example, if my ball weighed 4 ounces, that is ¼ or 25% of 16 ounces (a pound). I can multiply that percentage by the yards per pound from the yarn balance to get my total yardage.
850 ypp x 25% (enter .25) = 212.5 yards of mystery yarn.
The McMorran Yarn Balance is available at yarn shops or online from places like Halcyon Yarn, The Woolery, and Yarn Barn of Kansas. The product on these sites is called Yarn Balance. It is the same thing I showed in the video here.
Alternatively, Handwoven magazine shows you how to make a balance yourself here: https://handwovenmagazine.com/mcmorran-yarn-balance/
Let’s all avoid playing yarn chicken whenever possible!
Have you used a yarn balance yourself? Let us know in the comments.