A quick question about skeins of worsted weight wool

[peaceful_sands]

Just a quick question, I've got a pattern for a scrap afghan (actually a whole book of them) but it is a US book and while it gives equivalents for the stitch names and I've googled worsted weight and it says the nearest equivalent would be Double knitting what I don't seem able to discover is an approximate measure for 'skeins'.

The pattern is vague - the idea being to use up 'scraps' of wool, but it does say 'you will need 15 oz of the main colour and slightly less than a skein in these colours' but I can't figure out how much that will be to know whether I'll have anywhere near enough. Can anyone give me any clues or approximations? Thanks for any help.

Comments

[ysobel]

Does it suggest a particular brand? Skeins can very -- Patons classic wool has 100g (210 yds) per skein, Knit Picks Wool of the Andes has 50g (110 yds), Loops and Threads (the Michaels store brand) has 128g (268 yds)... heck, Lion Brand has a Pound of Love which is 448g (1020 yds). So if the book defaults to a particular brand then you can figure out how much they mean, but otherwise...

[peaceful_sands]

Thanks ever so much for the help. Unfortunately the pattern doesn't give any brands or anything like that. I think I'm just going to have to take a risk and hope that I've got enough of the 'scraps' that I can get the right amount for that section of the pattern - because saying I need less than a skein is not terribly helpful at all! Although when I look at it again it does say that I need 3360 yds or 1440g of scraps total - and that's between 24 different colours - so I guess if I work on the theory of that being 140 yds or 60g of each colour I can maybe have a chance of getting it right then.

One has to be optimistic about these things, no?

[curiosity]

When in doubt, wing it! :P

[melannen]

Worsted Weight is what I think of as "standard" weight for synthetic yarn - which of course doesn't help if your standard is different! It's 4-ply and what you'd use with a 4mm/8 UK/G US crochet hook if you weren't doing anything fancy.

How old is your book? Skeins got slowly heavier over the 20th century and then come the 21st century and novelty yarns and fancy wools they suddenly got smaller, but for something c1980s-early 2000s I'd assume something like 100-150 g, 200-250 yards (larger ones are usually 'super large bargain size' and smaller ones are usually fancy yarn.)