How to identify yarn without a label

A bag of unlabelled yarn is only useless until you know three things: how thick it is, what it's made of, and how much of it there is. All three can be measured at home. Here's the order to do it in.

Step 1 — Thickness: wraps per inch

Wrap the yarn snugly around a ruler — side by side, not overlapping, not pulled tight — for one inch, and count the wraps.

Full chart: Yarn weights. The method in detail, with the ways it goes wrong: What weight is my yarn?

Step 2 — Fibre: feel, water, burn

Feel it: wool is warm and grabby, acrylic cool and slippery, cotton cool and absorbent. Wet it: wool and cotton darken and soak, acrylic doesn't. Burn a snippet: protein fibres (wool, alpaca, silk) smell like hair and leave crumbly ash; plant fibres (cotton, linen) smell like paper and leave fine ash; synthetics melt into a hard bead. The full method: Wool or acrylic?

Step 3 — Yardage: weigh it

You can't count yards, but you can weigh grams. You need a kitchen scale that reads to 0.1 g, or a longer sample if it only reads whole grams.

1. Weigh the whole ball.
2. Wind off a known length — twenty yards, measured against a yardstick or between two marks a measured distance apart — and weigh just that.
3. Yardage ≈ (ball grams ÷ sample grams) × sample yards.

Worked example: the ball weighs 95 g; twenty yards of it weighs 8 g. 95 ÷ 8 × 20 ≈ 237 yards.

Rough ballparks per 100 g if you'd rather not measure:

• Fingering ≈ 400 yd
• Sport ≈ 300 yd
• DK ≈ 250 yd
• Worsted ≈ 200 yd
• Bulky ≈ 120 yd
• Super bulky ≈ 70 yd

Ballpark only — yardage varies a lot by fibre and spin.

Step 4 — Will it felt? (optional)

Rub a wet snippet with a little soap for a minute. If it starts to mat, it's untreated animal fibre: wash it cold, by hand.

Step 5 — Write it down

Put it in your stash so you never do this twice. The Yarn Finder will estimate the weight and take a guess at the fibre from a photo even without a label; correct it with what you measured and it's saved.