A Quick Chicken and Egg Follow-up

Two of my favorite things: George Bailey curled up on
one of my crocheted blankets. Ah, home.

I want to thank those readers who responded with excellent comments to my last blog post. One of the comments (about why crocheters might be reluctant to create garments) suggested that crocheting a garment (let's say any type of sweater, just to give a concrete example) takes on average more yarn than their knit counterparts, and given the cost of good yarn, crocheters might not want to go down that road.

Now I absolutely agree that, on average, it does take a little more yardage to crochet a sweater rather than knit one. I also agree that crocheters would probably like to use good yarn to make said top.

I also know that crocheters love, love, love to make blankets. While there are just shy of 4,400 crochet sweater projects in the Ravelry database (with sweater being defined as anything with a sleeve, sleeveless falls under the "top" category), there are a whopping 10,725 crochet blanket projects. Of that sizeable number, over 4,100 of them took 1,200 or more yards of yarn to create; a whopping 2,338 blankets (about 1/5 of the total crochet blanket projects) took more than 2,100 yards of yarn! Even if every one of those crafters in the latter category used Lion Brand's Pound of Love (1,020 yards per skein), they would still need to spend $30+ to make the blanket (it retails for $9.99); they might spend a little less with a sale + coupons. But you know that many crocheters spend far more than $30 on yarn for a blanket, even if it is on sale.

Did I hear you say yes to a sweater? Have I got
just the thing for you, my crafty crochet friend.

Now let's look at the crochet sweater numbers: slightly more than 3,000 projects used 1200 or more yards of yarn, distributed fairly evenly across the yardage categories (about 550 projects used 2,100 or more yards of yarn). At the highest amount of yarn used, a crafter could make a beautiful sweater in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for about $60 (including shipping), since it retails for $2.69 per 110 yard skein. That's 100% wool for $2.69 per skein. For almost the same amount as a crocheter would spend on blanket yarn (and there's all kinds of glory in blankets, people - I'm not knocking the blanket love), she could make a 100% wool sweater.

So c'mon crocheters - I know you want to. Really, really I do.