All tools

Yarn

Needles, hooks, gauge and yardage.

Yarn crafts have no international bureau of weights and measures. What they have is the Craft Yarn Council, a body of yarn companies, tool makers and publishers that agreed on a common chart so that a pattern printed in one magazine could be worked with tools bought from another. That chart is the source these tools quote, and its limits are theirs too: it maps millimetres to U.S. sizes and stops there, because the letters and numbers stamped on a needle vary between manufacturers in a way no standard has ever settled. The millimetre measurement is the only figure on the packaging that means the same thing everywhere, which is why every tool here treats it as the real size and the U.S. number as a label for it.

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Knitting needle size converter

Convert knitting needle sizes between millimetres and U.S. numbers using the Craft Yarn Council chart, and see which yarn weights each size is meant for.

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Crochet hook size converter

Convert crochet hook sizes between millimetres and U.S. letters and numbers using the Craft Yarn Council chart, and see which yarn weights each hook is meant for.

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Knitting gauge calculator

Turn the stitch and row count of your swatch into the number of stitches to cast on and rows to work for a piece of the size you want.

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Gauge conversion calculator

Your swatch does not match the pattern and you would rather not reknit it. Convert the pattern's stitch counts to your own gauge and keep the finished measurements.

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How much yarn do I need

Weigh your swatch and this works out how much yarn the finished piece will take, in grams, metres and whole balls — from your own knitting rather than from a table of averages.

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Hat size calculator

Turn a head measurement into the number of stitches to cast on, with the negative ease a hat needs to stay on and the Craft Yarn Council size band the head falls into.

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Sock size calculator

Turn a foot measurement into a sock cast-on, with the shoe size band and the sock height published by the Craft Yarn Council for that foot.

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Increase and decrease calculator

Spread increases or decreases evenly across a round or row and get the instruction to work from, including the two run lengths that never divide out neatly.

Suggest a tool

Tell us what is missing and where its numbers should come from.

What should it convert, calculate or generate, and where would the authoritative numbers come from? A link to the standard or publication that defines them is the most useful thing you can send.

Copies this page address so you can paste it wherever you report it.

How these tools are built

Two kinds of thing live here. The size charts are transcribed from the Craft Yarn Council standards row by row, keeping the repeated numbers and the gaps exactly as the standard prints them. The calculators are arithmetic over figures you supply — your swatch, your ball band — because the alternative is an average of somebody else's knitting, and averages are what make a sweater come out the wrong size. Every tool carries worked examples that run as tests, so a change that breaks one of them never ships.

Yarnsmith

Calculators and charts for people who make things out of yarn and thread.

Needle, hook and yarn weight figures are transcribed from the Craft Yarn Council standards.