Miriam Felton

The following is an excerpt from Twist & Knit:

To get the most knitted fabric from your yarn, there are a few techniques with which you will need to become familiar. The first is how to weigh your yarn. Some patterns in this book require that you split your yarn in half. For some items (such as the Porifera socks or Gable Mitts), you can work from both ends of a center pull ball at once. But for a piece like Vinca, its beneficial to have two separate balls, each with half of the yarn when you split for the wings. To do this, when you reach the point in the pattern where you need to split your yarn, weigh the full ball and record how much yarn you have total. Place your scale on the floor by your ball-winder and begin winding, keeping the digital scale on. The scale will read less and less as you wind off yarn from the full ball.

When the scale reads half of the total yarn weight, mark that point in your yarn (a slip knot with a bobby pin or paper clip through the loop works really well). Remove the ball from the ball winder and weigh both balls separately to make sure that they are equal. If not wind a few yards from the larger ball to the smaller and weigh again. When you’re satisfied you’ve got two equal balls, break the yarn and continue with the pattern as instructed.

Another technique that will become invaluable is how to measure how much yarn you are using per row or round. Once you’ve finished a row/round, measure off a yard of yarn from the piece. Tie a slip knot at this point and and put something through the loop of the slip knot (like a safety pin, or bobby pin). This keeps the slip knot from becoming unknotted as you tension the yarn. Work 1 row/round. Measure how far from your knitting to the slip knot. Subtract that distance from the 1 yard you measured, and you have determined how much yarn you used in a round.

If you reach the slip knot before finishing the row/round, remove the slip knot, finish the row/round, and start the process again, but this time, measure off two or three yards before the slip knot and knit a row/round and measure how much you have left.

Most of the pieces in Twist & Knit require you to leave a certain length of yarn in reserve for the bind off (i.e. 4 rows worth of yarn). This is when it becomes essential to know how much yarn you use per row/round. Also, if you need to finish your knitting on a certain row of the chart to complete a repeat, then you can determine if you have enough yarn left to finish another repeat by using this method and measuring how much yarn is left in the ball.