UNDERSTANDING TEX NUMBERS

YARN SPECIFICATIONS, EXPLAINING "TEX"
Information furnished by Mini-Mills Ltd. and reprinted here with permission.

Yarn weight can be described in many ways: Lace weight, Sport weight, Worsted weight, Bulky weight and Chunky weight are examples. This generally refers to the diameter of the yarn and is based roughly on the type of product to be produced from the yarn.

Because the fibres from different species vary greatly in their intrinsic weight, the same numbers can give yarns of vastly different appearance and performance. So fibre artists must knit or weave swatches even though the yarn is properly described. A pound of yarn of a specific diameter, will be a different length to another pound of yarn of the same diameter from a different species of fibre producing animal.

A preferred method of describing yarn is weight of yarn per unit of length. This method usually uses yards per pound or yards per ounce or grams per kilometer (1000 meters). This method is referred to as "TEX".

The TEX system starts by describing one ply of the yarn. This is referred to as a "Single". The first number you see in the TEX description refers to the weight in grams of one ply of that yarn. This number is followed by a forward slash and a second number that indicates how many Singles or plies are put together to make the yarn. For example, a TEX number of 50/2 means a yarn made out of Singles that each weigh 50 grams per 1000 meters (kilometer) and which has two plies or Singles twisted together. The resulting 2 ply yarn is 100 grams per kilometer. One pound of this 2 ply yarn would be approx. 4,960 yards (5000 yards for easy calculations). One pound of the Single ply would be about 10,000 yards. The following table of equivalent measures for a single ply yarn may be helpful:

For comparison, for a two ply yarn (i.e. 50/2), divide the Standard length by 2 (50 grams would make 5,000 yards of 2 ply). Or, to find out the 2 ply yarn weight of the Standard Length (10,000 yards), multiply the TEX gram weight by 2 (or for more plies, by that number of plies).

METRIC represents the number of 1,000 meter skeins of yarn that weigh 1 kilogram
ENGLISH WORSTED represents the number of 560 yard skeins that weigh 1 pound.