Calculator

Stripe Sequence Yarn Calculator

Working a striped project? Enter the stripe sequence and your repetitions — we'll add up the rows for each color and give you the yardage to buy, buffer included.

Calculator

Project settings

Constant across the striped section — e.g., your cast-on count for a scarf or the stitches around for a sweater body.

How many times the whole stripe sequence repeats. A 6-row repeat worked 12 times = 72 rows of fabric. Use 1 for a single, non-repeating sequence.

Defaults to 5 (worsted). Measure your own from a swatch: work 100 stitches, unravel, and measure the yarn used.

Safety margin on top of the raw yardage. 10% is plenty for striping — no carried strands means little waste. Set 0 for exact yardage.

From the yarn label (e.g., 220 for a worsted skein). Enter it and we'll also tell you how many whole skeins of each color to buy. Leave blank for yardage only.

Stripe sequence (0 rows per repeat)

List each band in work order. A color can appear more than once — we add up its rows automatically.

How this differs from colorwork charts

Stripes are specified by a sequence — "4 rows Blue, 2 rows White, 4 rows Blue, 2 rows Yellow" — that repeats up the fabric. Each row uses one color across its full width, and the same color comes back in later bands. That's a different shape from tapestry, mosaic, or Fair Isle colorwork, where two or more colors appear within the same row and you'd count stitches per color off a chart. If your project carries colors within a row, use the tapestry, mosaic, or Fair Isle calculators instead. If each row is a single color and the colors repeat in a pattern, this is the one you want — and because stripes carry no strands behind the work, they use noticeably less yarn than colorwork.

Reading the breakdown

You don't have to pre-compute "Blue appears in stripes 1 and 3, so that's 8 rows." Enter every band in order — repeat a color name as many times as it appears — and we aggregate by color for you. Each row of the result shows one unique color with the total stitches worked in it, its raw yardage, and the buffered amount to buy. The small "from stripes …" line under each color name tells you exactly which bands feed it, so you can check the math against your pattern. Percentages are each color's share of the whole project; they may not sum to exactly 100 after rounding, which is expected.

By default the breakdown is in yards. Enter your yards per skein (from the ball band) and we'll add a Skeins column — each color's buy-yards divided by the skein length, rounded up — plus a project skein total, so you get an exact shopping count. Leave it blank for yardage only.

Tips for an accurate estimate