Enough yarn to make this..Help

[Ga_Rebel]

Ok I don't have my tape measure on me so these are roughly the sizes I wanna do. Please bare with me I don't know if this will get confusing.

 

Ok I wanna make a stripped blanket. Roughly around 60in long by about 50in wide. The strips would be about 5in wide of three colors, a light blue, slightly darker blue and white. Now I have 2 7oz skeins of the light blue, 2 of the darker blue and 1 white (all 7ozs). Now the pattern will be worked with a DC stitch with a few rows of singles for the edge. With those dimentions do you think I have enough yarn or do I need to scale down. Is there a formula to figure this out.

 

Also each skein says its 364yrds.

[Lady_of_Roses]

So you have 35 oz of yarn total right? I don't think you have enough for a striped blanket of that size made of dcs, but if there's a calculator online available, I'm sure one of the wizards of crochet here will point it out to us soon.

[AuntyM]

As a "rule of thumb" I usually allow at least 50 to 60 ounces of worsted weight yarn for an adult-size afghan.

 

For a baby afghan, about 16 ounces sport-weight yarn is sufficient.

[Rachel]

For a blanket that size, you would probably need about double the amount of yarn you've got now. Maybe not quite double, but some of the patterns I've seen for a blanket the size you're describing take a pretty huge amount of yarn. What weight yarn are you using? Worsted, bulky? A good idea might be to go to Crochet Pattern Central and look at some of the blanket patterns to get an estimate of how much yarn a blanket close to yours might use.

[Ga_Rebel]

I am using worsted weight.

 

Well me and the hubby looked at some patterns and did some brainstorming. I can do a ghan that is about 42 x 46 with roughly 9 ~4in~ stripes.

 

Boy I am so glad he is better in math than me.

[SaxDragon]

This is how I figure it out when I start a project:

 

I start with a swatch - the yarn jacket should have the suggested number of single crochet stitches per inch on it. So say it's 12 sc per 4 inches, I'd make my foundation chain of 15 chains (3 per inch to get 5 inches across) , plus one to turn, then double crochet the rows until I had the width I want (5 inches tall).

 

Finish it off, and weigh it on my diet scale (in grams - most yarn jackets also list total grams in the skein). Multiply it out for the size afghan I want - I'd need 10 swatches across (which would be 150 chain stitches) and I'd need 9 swatches length to get 45 inches, so 10 x 9 = 90 swatches so multiply 90 by the gram weight of the swatch (let's say its 10 grams, times 90 = 900 grams) and divide that by the number of grams in one skein (lets say 150 grams) to get how many skeins of yarn to buy (900 / 150 = 6 skiens).

 

Divide that by three since you're doing 3 colors of stripes , (if they're all the same number of rows , so id'd be two of each color), and buy and extra skein (or two, depends on if its a small or big skein) of the color to trim it in (another one if you're adding fringe).

 

If the stripes aren't going to be the same number of rows, there's an extra step in the math to figure out what fraction each color is, divide out the total grams by the fractions, then by average grams in the skein (say in 30 rows, 5 are white, 10 are red, and 15 are blue = 1/6 white, 1/3(2/6) red, 1/2 (3/6)blue, and total grams are 900, so 900/6 is 150 grams of white or 1 skein, 900 by 3 is 300 is two skeins, 900 by 2 is 450 is 3 skeins).

 

Always round your numbers up in each step (no decimals), better to have some left over than not enough.

 

You can alternately unravel the swatch and measure it's length and multiply it all out for yardage - I used to do it that way before I had a kitchen scale :-)

 

I use grams instead of ounces because my scale automatically rounds up gram fractions, but not ounce fractions and it's easier for me. You can do ounces if you want to, but you round up odd number fractions (1/8 to a quarter, 3/8 to a half, 5/8 to three quarters, 7/8 to a whole) and keep track of the evens (1/4, 1/2, 3/4).

 

Hope that helps, and doesn't confuse you more :-)