Fiber content
"100% Superwash Merino Wool", "75% Wool 25% Nylon", "45% Silk 45% Kid Mohair 10% Lambswool". Listed by percentage, largest first, and the first fiber is the one that sets how the yarn behaves — a 75/25 wool-nylon is a wool that wears like a sock yarn, not a nylon. Words to look for: superwash (machine washable, will not felt), merino and extrafine (soft), baby on alpaca (fine grade), organic and GOTS (certified), mulesing-free. The fiber comparison says what each fiber does.
Weight class
A name — fingering, DK, worsted, chunky — and often the Craft Yarn Council symbol, a skein icon with a number 0 to 7. The name is a neighborhood, not a gauge: two worsteds can differ by a stitch an inch. The spec card on every yarn page here shows the category in the same skein symbol, with the number inside (weight categories follow the Craft Yarn Council standards, www.YarnStandards.com), beside a glyph for the main fiber and the care symbols the mill's care line spells out. The yarn weights guide has the scale and the UK and Australian names (4 ply, 8 ply) that mean the same things.
Skein weight and yardage
"100 g / 210 yd" or "50 g / 100 m". The two numbers together are the yarn's density, and yardage is what projects are counted in; grams only compare yarns of the same fiber and construction. A 100 g skein holds 90 yards of bulky or 450 of fingering. If the band gives meters, multiply by 1.09 for yards. Our spec cards show both weight and yardage, and the calculator on every yarn page turns a pattern's total into skeins.
Suggested needle and gauge
"US 7–9 (4.5–5.5 mm)" and "18–20 sts = 4"". This is the needle the mill used and the gauge it got with it, for a plain stockinette fabric: a starting point for your swatch, not a rule. A pattern's gauge overrides it, and your hands may need a size up or down to get there. Crochet bands give a hook and a gauge in single or double crochet the same way. The gauge swatch guide is the next step.
Care symbols
A basin with a hand means hand wash; a basin with a number is the water temperature in Celsius (30 is cool); a crossed-out basin, do not wash; a circle is dry cleaning; a square with a horizontal line, dry flat; a crossed-out square-in-a-circle, do not tumble dry; a crossed-out triangle, no bleach; an iron with dots, the iron's heat, crossed out for none. Read them before buying for a gift. The care guide turns them into what to actually do.
Colorway and dye lot
The color's name or number, and below or beside it the dye lot: the batch number of the dye run. Skeins from different lots can differ by a shade that shows as a line across a sweater, so every skein in a project should share a lot. Every skein in an order from us does, and the dye lot guide covers how to find the number and what to do if lots must be mixed. Hand-dyed yarns sometimes carry no lot at all; there, alternate skeins.
Country of origin and the mill
Where the fiber was grown and where it was spun are often different places; a band usually names the latter. It is a quality signal more than a rule — Italian, Peruvian, Japanese and American mills each have strengths — and the brand pages here say where each line is made.
The band is the record
Keep one band per project with the swatch and the leftover yarn. It is how you will match a lot a year later, know the care rule for the sweater, and remember what the yarn was called when you want it again. Every yarn page on this site is the band's contents in one card, plus what the band leaves out: how it felts, how it pills, and what we would knit in it.