Yarn Yardage Calculator

This calculator estimates how much yarn a project will consume and how many skeins to buy, working from stitch geometry rather than a lookup table: total stitch count (stitches per row times number of rows) is multiplied by your yarn-per-stitch consumption figure to get total inches of yarn used, which is then converted to yards. Skeins needed divides that total by your skein's labeled yardage and rounds up, so you're never short by a fraction of a skein — the calculation is done with a six-decimal rounding step first specifically to avoid a common floating-point trap where a project needing exactly, say, 3.0 skeins comes out as 3.0000000004 and gets rounded up to 4. A 10% waste buffer is reported separately and also folded into a "recommended total yards" figure, covering swatching, tension inconsistency, and the yarn lost to knots or cast-on/bind-off tails.

The yarn-per-stitch figure is the calculator's biggest source of uncertainty: it varies by yarn weight, stitch pattern, and needle size, so a swatch-based yardage test (weighing or measuring a known swatch) will always beat a generic per-stitch estimate. One caveat on the numbers as they stand: the "Total Cost Estimate" output is currently just a placeholder equal to the skein count rather than a real dollar figure, so it isn't yet meaningful for budgeting a purchase — don't read it as an actual price until per-skein cost is wired in.