Mmmm... luxury sock yarn. I'm experiencing stash envy. Although if I had it, I probably would be too stresse out about finding a place to store it, and wouldn't enjoy it.

Polly, thank you *so* much for all your hard work. I have a skein of the Lana Grosse Boot Stretch in my stash. I'll weigh it, if I can, and get back to you.
I love that 'planning for your retirement' angle. I'll have to use that the next time I want extra money for yarn!

Ang

My question now is, how many yards (of average fingering/sock weight yarn) are there in three grams?? Math makes my head hurt...

Your findings in sock yarn weight are really interesting -- and they agree with my less scientific findings. I am, of course, weighing all my socks yarns from now on to check actual weight.

Wouldn't it be cool to have an online database where we could all enter our findings? Yes I know I need to get out more. ;-)

I hope you didn't tell your sock yarns about the helicopter / Scilly Islands story - If you did, they were probably getting all excited that their public weigh-in was going to result in a fun trip!

Well, this gives me a reason to buy some of that Fleece Artist, doesn't it? I mean, what a bargain, 17 grams extra!

Oh Polly - I can't say a thing about your stash having spent most of yesterday re-organising mine, I am pretty much matching you skein for skein (tho' mine's not all sock yarn !)

Heather x

I've always thought that yarn stashing is as important as saving for your retirement, so that when the time comes when you can't afford all of life's little luxuries, you have a private supply of luxuries waiting to be raided :-)
I have to say, though, you've been doing a better job of planning for your retirement than I have!

I love that you graphed it with variances and everything. Such a math geek, it's too funny! :-)
No judging on the size of sock yarn stash. I mentioned the number of my skeins of sock yarn and you pooh-poohed my stash as paltry or rather, baby stash. I'm good with that too!

No chastisement here -- just envy! I am growing my sockyarn stash bit by bit, though. Thanks for the information of yardage/weight; it will be good to keep in mind at the LYS!

That is so interesting. I am ready to go and weigh all my yarn, sock or not. Of course, that might take a couple of weeks.

Dude, my sock yarn stash is in the TRIPLE digits (and I'm NOT disclosinf which digits!) so don't worry about yours - no chastisement here! :)

Oh My Golly! No chastisement, just wonder and awe at your sock stash. I'd love to play in your stash, or just look at pictures. So apart from the wight issue, which are your favorites?

That's very, very informative and interesting. Thank you. I'd never make a judgemental comment on anyone else's stash but I'm of the, firmly held, opinion that sock yarn doesn't count anyway. Have you got a 'scientific' opinion on whether speed knittting increases the chances of a marginal amount of yarn being sufficient?

Okay, let me do that again. Bad stats major. I forgot to be dividing by root 49 in my confidence interval. It's really concluding with 95% confidence that the true mean difference is 3.7959 +/- 1.589 or (2.2069, 5.3849) and we conclude that the mean difference is in fact above 2. That makes more sense. *phew* Ignore my last comment :)

If you'd like a wee bit of stats applied to that, using a 95% confidence interval we get an average difference of 3.7959 with a standard deviation of 5.6752. So throw that together, assuming it's normally distributed because n>40, and we can claim with 95% confidence that the true mean difference is 3.7959 +/- 11.1233 or that it's in the interval (-7.3274, 14.9189). So we can't conclude (from a statistical stand point) that the difference is actually anything other than zero as it's in our confidence interval. Sample size is still coming back to cause trouble because there's such a large variance (not variance in the sense you used it though). I'm still surprised at the huge range even if stats doesn't really work in our favour. 17g's over is a lot. Though it's to the advantage of knitters, you really wonder how much money the companies that regularly "over fill" the hanks are losing on it...

[in a daze] I love maths ...
:)

I don't have a leg to stand on, I can safely say that mine's bigger than yours and I don't include the vacuum pack of koigu as sock yarn!

You sorely tempt me to go home and weigh all my yarn!!! Maybe this will spread like the wind through the blogs, so that we might actually get some statistically valid conclusions ;-)

Polly (and others), I'm "weighing in" today regarding yesterday's post on a "largish" project using singles yarn. It would be a very good idea to make an oversize gauge swatch. Sometimes, if the singles has any "overtwist" at all, the knitted item may bias. Also, it would be a good idea to hand wash the sample and lay flat to dry (don't block), just to make sure the "bias" doesn't appear after washing. Actually "singles" yarn can be fun if you can anticipate "bias" in your design!

Hey, you just have a lifetime of socks for the future. I see no problem with that! You are just a very careful person!

Interesting!

That's actually very interesting. Thanks.
This should help in the cases were I'm knitting to the very last little bit of a skein and fear running out early.

And your yarn stash look so reasonable :)

Wow! Great research and interesting findings!

Wow! Great research and interesting findings!