About Handcraft

Handcraft is a free toolbox for people who make things by hand. It exists because the hardest part of a craft project is usually not the craft: it is working out how much yarn to buy, whether that board is worth the price, how much wax fills forty jars, and what to charge once the thing is finished.

What you will find here

Three kinds of thing, and they are deliberately different from each other.

Calculators turn your own measurements into a number you can act on. Every one shows its formula, states its assumptions, and gives you the workings rather than just an answer, so you can judge whether the estimate is good enough for your project.

Converters translate between the units and the sizing systems that craft instructions use, because a pattern written in one country is routinely read in another.

Guides and projects explain the parts a number cannot reach: why gauge matters more than the ball band, why dressed lumber is smaller than its nominal size, why a dye lot change shows across a whole blanket, and what a project actually involves before you spend anything.

How the numbers are worked out

Every calculator on this site uses published reference data and plain arithmetic. Where a standard publishes a range, we take the middle of the range and say so. Where a figure is inherently approximate, such as the density of a wax or the yarn a stitch consumes, we say that too, and we explain how the figure was derived rather than presenting it as a measurement.

The one thing we will not do is invent prices. Material costs depend on where you live, what you buy and when, so the cost tools ask you for the figures and do the arithmetic on them. If a tool ever shows you a price this site made up, that is a bug.

What this site is not

These are planning estimates, not guarantees. Material quantities deserve a test piece. A formulation for soap, resin or any other chemical process must be verified against a proper calculator and the supplier's own data, and safe practice is your responsibility. Nothing here is professional, legal, financial or safety advice, and the disclaimer says so in full.

Privacy in one paragraph

No account is needed to use anything here, and nothing you type into a calculator is stored. Your calculation travels in the page and lives in the URL so you can bookmark or share it. The only accounts on this site belong to the people who write and maintain it. The privacy page has the detail.

Who writes it

The site is written and maintained by makers who found themselves doing the same arithmetic on scraps of paper and decided to write it down properly. Every guide is written by a person, edited for accuracy, and corrected when a reader tells us we got something wrong. If a tool gives you a figure that does not match your own experience, that is worth knowing about: use the contact page and tell us.