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 readers, might not know this simple tool exists.