Why You Want A Kitchen Scale

I have a small kitchen scale at home. I use it to measure yarn, fiber, and (now that we're gluten free at home) ingredients for baking.

I feel it's important to have one, as a designer, because I use it to see how much of that 100-gram skein of sock yarn I REALLY used. I can then do some math and see how many sizes are possible with one skein.

Now that I have one, I can't see how I went without it. It's even better if you use it to help manage your stash on Ravelry. If you check out my stash page for the yarn above, you'll see that I have about 360 yards left of this particular yarn. In Ravelry, you can plug in the percentage you have of a skein of yarn (in this case, 80%), and it figures out the leftover yardage for you.

Why does this matter? 360 yards isn't a lot of sock yarn. But, I can use the Pattern Browser and Advanced Search for patterns on Ravelry to see that over 6,000 patterns use less than 300 yards of this type of yarn. So, instead of stash diving, I can "pattern dive" for my next project.

Incidentally, if someone out there searches stashes for this particular yarn and discovers that I have just enough to save their bacon and let them finish a project, then I can be their personal hero. That is always a good thing, and wouldn't be possible without a precise way to measure my leftover yarn.