Vintage patterns and the search for discontinued yarns

The beauty and pain of working with vintage patterns is that they require a little love and work before you’ve even started swatching and knitting. And math. Oh the math.

We get often get asked about the discontinued yarns. The yarn companies are often long gone by the time we find the pattern and decide to make it. We want to know how much yarn we need to buy at the start of the project so we don't have the match dye lots, or worse, try to find a substitute yarn for the substitute yarn. This means a little research is needed to find a substitute modern yarn.

The research I do to find the correct yarn weight and estimate yarn yardage generally consists of:

• An online search of the name of the discontinued yarn. This usually leads me to the Purple Kitty Discontinued Yarn Chart site (https://purplekittyyarns.com/discontinued-yarn). 

• I also take a look at the Vintage yarn wiki to see if we have the yarn info listed there (https://vintageyarn.fandom.com/wiki/VintageYarn_Wiki). Alison posts information on yarn as she finds it in the vintage pattern books or when she finds vintage yarn in thrift stores. You can add vintage yarn info as you come across it in real life.

• I’ve also found that using the Bing search engine often provides better search results on vintage yarns than other search engines. I don’t know why it works better it just does.

• An Etsy search for the yarn.

• A search on eBay for the specific yarn. It’s amazing how often I find the yarn I am searching for, for sale on eBay.

• A Ravelry search for both the yarn manufacturer and the specific yarn. There’s a lot of good information entered by users.

• A search for similar types of patterns to find the yardage requirements for the specific pattern.

If I can’t find information for the yarn, I am searching for I head over to the Craft Yarn Council’s website to look at their Standard Yarn Weight System. I’ve been able to figure out the yarn weight based on the knitting needle or crochet hook size and/or the swatch gauge of the pattern. While this will not give the yardage needed for a pattern, at least I have an idea of what weight yarn to use (https://www.craftyarncouncil.com/standards/yarn-weight-system).

For example, we were looking for information on Spinnerin Sparkle Twist yarn. I couldn’t find any info online regarding the yarn. I visited most of the sites listed above, and still came up with nothing. After looking at the Standard Yarn Weight System, I figured that the yarn was a lace or super fine yarn (0 or 1) based on the size of the crochet hook used. I then went to the Purple Kitty site, saw that the yarn would likely be a Category “A” yarn, and that the average yarn yardage for that category was 175 yards. It varied from 145 to 200+ yards per skein. The pattern called for 11-13 skeins of yarn, so I multiplied 175 yards of yarn by 11 skeins and came up with 1,925 yards of yarn.

That’s my process for estimating yardage for vintage yarn and patterns.

Happy needling!