Measuring up

I love recycling yarn.  I could spend hours combing the thrift store shelves in search of a great find.  As most of my yarn comes from pulling apart sweaters these days, I usually don't know how much I have of any given yarn - other than the generic a lot!

So much yarn...but how much?

This hadn't bothered me before, but joining the 12 shawls in 2012 challenge, one of the posting requirements is yardage. Now, I could estimate based on the pattern or the weight, but as soon as the idea snuck* into my mind, I knew I would have to figure out a way to actually measure the yarn.

 
Enter....the internets!  After looking at the expensive tools, I ran across this excellent summary of options, which pointed me to the brilliantly simple solution of using a bike computer.  After all, a swift is basically a wheel, and all you need to do is count rotations!

After a bit of fiddling with the circumference, I'm fairly certain that I'm getting a good reading.  Since I have so much yarn to ball, I do cheat a bit.  I'll unwind a few balls to the swift, measure those, average the yardage/weight ratio.  Then for the remaining sweater bits I can unwind straight onto the ball winder, saving a step, and just calculate the length from the weight.  It's not the most accurate method, but the estimate is certainly good enough for my purposes.

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*Apparently the proper form of this word is "sneaked"...but that just sounds odd.  I'm going with the informal conjugation.