Comparing Worsted Weight Yarn

I have a tendency to go all out when I am giving a gift. There is nothing I love more than taking a photo of something else they absolutely adore and turning that into a pattern to make them a blanket. Most of the time I am designing a blanket with a dog and other times I am designing something more colorful. I usually encounter one major problem. There is no brand of yarn that has every color you could possibly need. Although some do come close there is always a shade of brown that one brand makes and another shade I need by another brand. I then find myself standing in the craft store trying to compare the thickness of each yarn as well as the gauge.

When I design these blankets, I usually use color work or corner to corner. Now for the colorwork blankets, the rows become uneven and wavy if I don’t use brands who are similar in size. With corner to corner, you can get away with yarns that are slightly different in size but it just looks and flows better if you can match yarn sizes as close as possible. I then find myself make several swatches trying to identify the yarns closest in size. Months or years later, I would start another blanket making the swatches again, sometimes with the same brands. In an effort to save time, I tried to search for any sights that compared yarn sizes but there were minimal resources for that with limited yarns that were compared.

That is why I have decided to create list of worsted weight yarns so you can compare their sizes. I will use an I/5.5mm hook and make each swatch 27 dc sts by 15 rows. There will be the width and height of each block places into a chart, so you have a resource to compare the different sizes of worsted weight yarn. There will be no more standing in the yarn isle comparing yarns to find similar brands in the colors you need. There will be no more creating a swatch every yarn to see how similar they are. There will be no more buying every brand to try out because you don’t know how the different brands of yarn compare. You can now just look at this chart to see how close in size they are.

I tried to provide as much information as I can to help you learn about the yarn without having it in your hand. In addition to the size each block came out, I wanted to show the wraps per inch (WPI). WPI is the amount of times the yarn can be wrapped around something in one inch. In order to find this, you could loosely wrap the yarn around a ruler for the first inch. A worsted weight yarn should be 9-12 WPI. I wrapped mine differently. I wrapped it so there were no spaces and the yarn completely covered the inch. I did it this way so you could see how there is such a huge variation in the thickness of worsted weight yarns.

So far I have only added a handful of yarns, but I am hard at work making more swatches to add to the collection. If there is a yarn you would like to see or information you would like listed that isn’t already, please feel free to send me a message!