There are two ways to buy yarn: by touching it or by reading it.
In Peru, it's almost always bought by touch. You go to the supplier, run your hand over the cone, stretch it a little, hold it up to the light and decide. And it works; a trained eye almost never gets it wrong.
The problem appears when you grow. When your production goes from twenty kilos to two hundred, when the supplier is a thousand kilometers away, or when your client is on another continent. At that point you can't touch anything. You only have a PDF with numbers.
The technical sheet is the hand you can't use. And if you learn to read it, it tells you almost everything your fingers would: how thick it is, how it will behave on the machine, how far it goes, and which garment it will work for.
This guide teaches you how to read it. No jargon, and with what truly matters: what goes wrong in production if you misread each data point.
A technical sheet is the document that summarizes all the characteristics of a yarn: its composition, its thickness, its strength, its finish, and more. It is the yarn's "résumé" and allows you to make informed decisions before buying, designing, or producing.
At Inca Tops, every yarn in our Stock Service has its own technical sheet, designed for designers, brands, and knitters alike.
The count indicates thickness. In alpaca yarns you will almost always see it expressed as Nm, the metric number, which means how many meters of yarn are in one gram.
Basic rule: the higher the Nm, the finer the yarn.
When you see two numbers separated by a slash, the first is the number of plies and the second is the thickness of each ply:
Nm 2/14 = two plies of Nm 14 twisted together
And here is the calculation that almost everyone gets wrong: the resulting yarn is not Nm 14, it is Nm 7. You divide the 14 by the 2 plies. If you buy thinking it is a 14, you will receive a yarn considerably thicker than you expected.
| Yarn | Count on sheet | Works as |
| ALPAWOOL LIGHT | Nm 2/14 | Nm 7 |
| Nuna Brushed | Nm 1/15.6 | Nm 15.6 |
| Suri Air | Nm 1/9.4 | Nm 9.4 |
| Andes Tweed 1/4 | Nm 1/4 | Nm 4 |
If you misread the count: you buy the wrong thickness. It is the most expensive mistake and the most common one, because you only discover it when the cone is already in your workshop.
Learn about the differences between alpaca types
Gauge is the fineness of the machine: how many needles it has per inch. The higher the gauge, the finer and tighter the knit.
Alpawool Light: 7gg · Nuna Brushed: 10gg · Suri Air: 5gg – 7gg
This field saves you test runs. The supplier has already knitted that yarn and knows which gauge it performs best on.
If you ignore the suggested gauge: on a gauge that is too fine for the yarn, the machine strains and the yarn breaks. On one that is too coarse, the fabric comes out open and without body. You can go outside the suggested range, but do it intentionally and with a sample first, not by oversight.
How little you can buy at one time.
All Essentials Stock Service yarns: 1 kg
It seems like an administrative detail, it is actually a strategic one. A low minimum allows you to knit a real sample on your own machine before committing to a full production run. A fifty-kilo minimum forces you to decide blind.
This field rarely appears in blogs and is the one production managers appreciate most. It covers the industrial washing and drying conditions for the yarn.
ALPAWOOL LIGHT: machine wash on a wool cycle at low speed. Temperature must not exceed 45 °C to prevent felting. 9-minute cycle, with 15-second agitation bursts followed by 5-second pauses. After spinning, dry at 80 °C. Do not overload the machine.
If you ignore the finishing instructions: you felt the batch. Exceeding the temperature or overloading the machine shrinks and mats the garment irreversibly. There is no fix — the production run is lost.
These three do not appear on the public technical sheets of most suppliers. But they exist, they are measured in the laboratory, and if your production needs them, you can ask for them.
Twist indicates the direction in which the yarn plies have been twisted.
Alongside the direction comes a second equally important figure: how many turns per meter the yarn carries.
More twist produces a firmer, more resilient fabric. Less twist produces a softer, fluffier one.
Why it matters: if the twist is not balanced with the working direction of your machine, the fabric comes out skewed: the garment twists on the body after the first wash. It is a defect that only appears in the finished garment, by which point you have already produced the entire batch.
Ask for it if: you are producing high volume, or if you are working with more than one yarn in the same garment.
Measures how consistent the yarn is along its entire length. No yarn is perfectly uniform — it has sections that are slightly thicker and others that are slightly thinner. The CV% puts a number to that variation.
Why it matters: a high CV% produces barré, those horizontal stripes that appear in the fabric when the machine feeds sections of different thicknesses. It is the data point that explains why two pieces in the same color can look different.
Ask for it if: you produce plain fine-knit garments, where any irregularity shows.
These values indicate how much tension the yarn can withstand before breaking (strength) and how far it can stretch without losing its shape (elongation).
Why it matters: in industrial knitting the yarn works under constant tension. Low strength means breakages on the machine — production stops, more defects, more setup time. Low elongation produces rigid fabrics with poor recovery.
This data point is exactly the reason why Suri Air carries 22% recycled polyamide: pure Suri, due to its smooth structure, does not hold up well under industrial tension. The blend is not there to cut costs, it is there to keep the yarn running.
Ask for it if: you work with high-speed machines or are going to produce long runs.
Discover all the qualities in Essentials Stock Service
If you have a technical sheet in front of you and limited time:
And if the production run is large or the garment is plain and fine-knit, ask for the CV% and the twist before closing the order.
What does "2/14" on a technical sheet mean exactly?
Two plies of Nm 14 twisted together. The resulting yarn works as Nm 7, because you divide the count by the number of plies.
How do I calculate how many meters are in a 1 kg cone?
Nm is meters per gram, so multiply by one thousand. An Nm 7 yields approximately 7,000 meters per kilo; an Nm 15.6, around 15,600.
Can I use a gauge different from the one suggested?
Yes, but knit a sample first. Outside the suggested range the yarn may break more frequently or produce a fabric that is too open.
Why don't all technical sheets include the same data?
Because there is no single standard format in the industry. Composition, count, and gauge fields are almost universal; CV%, twist, and tensile strength vary depending on the supplier and their laboratory capacity.
Can I request the CV% or twist of an Inca Tops yarn?
Yes. They are not on the public technical sheet, but they are measured and we can share them. Contact us indicating the yarn and the production you need it for.
Do I need to understand all of this to place an order?
No. With composition, count, and gauge you can make most decisions confidently. The rest becomes relevant as your volume grows, and that is exactly what we are here for.
A technical sheet is not a formality or a catalog decoration. It is the only way to know how a yarn will behave when you can no longer touch it, and to anticipate problems that, once they appear in production, can no longer be fixed.
You don't need to be a textile engineer. You need to know what to ask and what each answer means.
In Essentials, every yarn has its technical sheet available, and the 1 kg minimum order allows you to knit a real sample before scaling up.
If you have a technical sheet in hand and are not sure how to interpret it, write to us at essentials@incatops.com — we will be happy to go through it with you.
