Project Planner
Pick a project type, enter its size and your materials, and get the whole picture at once: skeins to buy, total stitches, rows, finished weight, and roughly how many hours of work it is — before you cast on or make a slip knot.
Materials
Two different kinds of estimate, combined
Yardage and finished weight here come from typical fabric density for your chosen yarn weight and project area — the same method our dedicated Yardage Estimator uses, which holds up regardless of the exact gauge you knit or crochet at, because a looser gauge means bigger, more yarn-hungry stitches while a tighter gauge means more, smaller stitches covering the same area with roughly the same total length of yarn. Stitch count, row count, and estimated time, on the other hand, come directly from your actual measured gauge, because those genuinely do depend on how many stitches you personally fit into an inch. Both numbers are internally consistent estimates; they're just answering different questions from different inputs.
Why the time estimate is the roughest number here
Total stitches divided by a stitches-per-minute pace ignores everything that isn't the stitch itself — counting rows, reading a chart, frogging a mistake, swatching, blocking, weaving in ends, and simply putting the project down for a week are all real time a finished object takes that this number doesn't capture. Treat the hours estimate as "hands-on stitching time at a steady pace," not a hard deadline, and expect the real calendar time on any project with color changes, cables, or lace charting to run noticeably longer than the raw stitch math suggests.
The sweater and hat numbers are simplified shapes
A sweater's real shaping (sleeves, armholes, neckline, waist shaping) and a hat's crown taper both use less exact fabric than a flat rectangle or a plain cylinder of the same outer measurements — this planner approximates both as simplified shapes to keep the inputs to a handful of measurements, which makes it a solid first-pass estimate for a shopping list and a time budget, not a substitute for a full pattern's precise yardage requirement once you've picked one out.