NEEDLES AND YARN

knitting needle sizes in three systems — metric, old UK, US — and the 0–7 yarn weights per the Craft Yarn Council

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: units · everyone · reference · study

Metric and US numbers and the 0–7 yarn weight system are verbatim from the Craft Yarn Council tables (“Hooks & Needles”, “Standard Yarn Weight System”). Old UK numbers follow the customary conversion table, checked against three independent British sources that agree row for row. Checked 2026-08-13.

THE NUMBER IS NOT THE SIZE

The US number on the package is not a size: 5 numbers (US 3, 6, 9, 10, 17) each stand for two different diameters — US 3 is both 3.125 and 3.25 mm. And the old UK numbers run backwards: the higher the number, the thinner the needle — 14 is 2 mm, while 000 is a full 10 mm.

That is why the Craft Yarn Council advises trusting the millimetres: diameter is the one measure that agrees across every package, and it is what the first column of the table prints.

On the sheet

Metric and US numbers and the 0–7 yarn weight system are verbatim from the Craft Yarn Council tables (“Hooks & Needles”, “Standard Yarn Weight System”). Old UK numbers follow the customary conversion table, checked against three independent British sources that agree row for row. Checked 2026-08-13.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 10 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

NEEDLES AND YARN

THE NUMBER IS NOT THE SIZE

On the sheet

Printing

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