Halloween crochet: yarn per project and a 4-weekend plan

The quick answer, by project type

Find the kind of thing you want to make. Metres are the yarn one item uses. Items per ball are worked out against a UK yarn in the pattern’s own weight: Stylecraft Special DK (295m), Special Aran (196m) and Special Chunky (144m), all 100g, and Bernat Blanket for super chunky, which comes in 300g balls of 201m. Wool Warehouse lists all four.

Small DK pieces are where a ball goes furthest. Stuffed pumpkins mostly fit in one ball. Candy bowls and cauldrons split in two: one ball in aran, several in super chunky. The squishes, which are pillow-sized amigurumi, are a different kind of project, and so is their yarn bill. Nine of the 21 patterns are Moogly’s, seven of them in super chunky, so one designer sets most of the figures for bowls and squishes.

Four weekends, four balls

Halloween 2026 is Saturday 31 October. Counting from the weekend of 3–4 October, that leaves four weekends: 3–4, 10–11, 17–18 and 24–25 October. Here is one way to spend them, with a single 100g ball each weekend.

Weekend one, black DK. Handy Little Me’s mini witch hat takes 20 to 30g of DK and stands 9 to 10cm tall, so one ball of Stylecraft Special DK makes three to five, with a little contrast for the hatbands. At the designer’s 40 minutes of active time each, the batch is 2 to 3⅓ hours.

Weekend two, orange DK. The same designer’s pumpkin coaster takes 30 to 40g and 20 minutes of active time, so a ball makes two or three, with scraps of brown and green for the stalk and leaf.

Weekend three, chunky. Bella Coco’s Chestnut Falls pumpkin needs 87 yards for the body of the small size, about 80 metres, plus 3 yards for the stalk. A 144m ball of Special Chunky covers the small pumpkin with about 60 metres to spare, or the medium (131 yards) with about 20 metres left over.

Weekend four, orange aran. Pattern Paradise’s Jack O’ Pumpkin candy bowl asks for 160 yards of orange and 30 of black in worsted weight, the US cousin of aran. That’s 146 metres of orange, so one 196m ball of Special Aran covers the body with about 50 metres to spare. The black legs and face come from your stash, and the bowl is finished a week before the trick-or-treaters arrive.

At £2.35 a ball, the four weekends cost £9.40 in yarn, plus oddments for hatbands, stalks and faces. For that you get a small coven of hats, two or three coasters, a pumpkin and a candy bowl.

Which projects eat the most orange and black

Among the patterns that name their colours, the hungriest for orange is the Jack O’ Pumpkin bowl, at 146 metres. In weight that’s about 75g of Special Aran, about twice what the pumpkin coaster needs.

The black record goes to a hat, not a bat. Handy Little Me’s adult witch hat used 351 yards of black Himalaya Snow, 321 metres, and the designer says she needed three balls. Moogly’s Bat Squish comes second, at 330 yards of Bernat Blanket in Coal, about 302 metres. Moogly’s cauldron with lid uses 165 yards of black, held three strands together, for a pot only 15cm across.

If you’re buying for several projects, add up each colour across all of them before you order, then round each colour up to whole balls on its own. The yarn budget calculator does this if you put one colour on each row.

Super chunky is quick, not cheap

Moogly’s squishes are about 25cm across and worked on an 8mm hook, and Tamara Kelly says she made the bat in under 10 hours. The yarn is the catch. Bernat Blanket costs £13.29 for a 300g ball at Wool Warehouse, checked 3 October 2026, which puts the yarn in the bat at about £20, and in the ghost and eyeball at about £14 each.

The ghost shows how fine the margins are. Moogly lists 230 yards, 210 metres, and a 300g ball of Bernat Blanket holds 201 metres (220 yards). Kelly says she tried to fit the ghost into one ball and needed a couple more yards, so if you have only one ball of white she suggests working the bottom in another colour. The tentacle candy bowl is the most expensive pattern in our list, at 400 yards and about £24 of yarn, though she says you could make it in an evening or two.

Those figures are shares of a ball. At the till you pay for whole ones: two balls for the bat, the ghost or the tentacle bowl come to £26.58, and the eyeball’s four colours mean four balls unless you have leftovers. £26.58 buys 11 balls of Stylecraft Special, enough for the four-weekend plan nearly three times over. That isn’t a reason to skip the bat, only a reason to price the yarn before you start.

Where the numbers come from

We opened free patterns from six designers: Handy Little Me, Bella Coco, Lucy Kate Crochet, Pattern Paradise, Moogly and Annie Design Crochet. We kept the 21 that give a yarn quantity, and noted the finished size, hook and any time the designer states. Nine of the 21 are Moogly’s, read through archived copies on the Wayback Machine. Yards were converted at 0.9144 metres. Where a designer gives grams, we counted and priced by weight.

We haven’t made these projects ourselves. The quantities are the designers’ own, and each pattern is linked below. All except Bella Coco’s are written in US terms, so where a pattern says sc, work a UK double crochet.

Costs use Stylecraft Special at £2.35 a 100g ball for DK, aran and chunky, and Bernat Blanket at £13.29 for 300g for super chunky, all at Wool Warehouse, checked 3 October 2026, before delivery. They cover the yarn each item uses, not the whole balls you buy. Super chunky patterns written for other yarns, such as Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick, Bernat Plush, King Cole Yummy or chenille, are priced at the Bernat Blanket rate and marked “est.” in the table, so treat those as rough estimates. We left Handy Little Me’s adult witch hat unpriced, because the pattern allows bulky or super bulky yarn, and Moogly’s glow-in-the-dark lid yarn unpriced too.

Read the yarn list before you buy

Halloween patterns hide a few traps in their materials lists. The Jack O’ bowl’s base is worked with two strands held together, and Moogly’s cauldron holds three, which is why both take more yarn than their size suggests. Pattern Paradise’s Spookles the Ghost lists the coloured yarns in yards but the white as “1 skein”, which is a buying quantity, not what the ghost uses.

Annie Design Crochet’s Halloween garland asks for one ball each of eight colours of Anchor Creativa 4 ply, for seven triangles and seven cobwebs. That’s a shopping list rather than a measure, so we couldn’t turn it into metres. The designer suggests looking in your stash for similar colours first, and any 4 ply or sport weight cotton will do.

If you paste a pattern’s materials section into our pattern reader, it lists the yarns and quantities for you, so you can check what you already have before ordering.

How long they take, where designers say

Handy Little Me is the only designer here who gives times as a rule. Her printable patterns list active time: 20 minutes for the pumpkin coaster, 40 for the mini witch hat, an hour for the super chunky pumpkins and two hours for the chenille cauldron basket.

Moogly gives times in passing: under 10 hours for the Bat Squish, an afternoon for the Candy Corn Door Basket, less than 2 hours for either size of the Plush Pumpkin Basket, and an evening or two, or a weekend, for the tentacle bowl. Treat these as one person’s pace. Stuffing, sewing on faces and weaving in ends add up across a batch.

Common questions

Sources and scope

• www.handylittleme.com/crochet-mini-witch-hat-pattern/
• www.handylittleme.com/crochet-pumpkin-coaster/
• www.handylittleme.com/free-crochet-pumpkin-pattern-for-beginners/
• www.handylittleme.com/rustic-farmhouse-crochet-pumpkin-pattern/
• www.handylittleme.com/crochet-witch-hat/
• www.handylittleme.com/crochet-cauldron-pattern/
• blog.bellacococrochet.com/how-to-crochet-the-chestnut-falls-pumpkin-free-pattern-tutorial/
• lucykatecrochet.com/squishy-crochet-cat-pattern
• pattern-paradise.com/2017/10/03/free-crochet-pattern-jack-o-pumpkin-candy-bowl/
• pattern-paradise.com/2019/10/09/free-crochet-pattern-spookles-the-ghost/
• pattern-paradise.com/2016/10/03/free-crochet-pattern-halloween-headband/
• www.anniedesigncrochet.com/halloween-crochet-garland-free-pattern/
• web.archive.org/web/20260109071206/https://www.mooglyblog.com/bat-squish/
• web.archive.org/web/20260115072012/https://www.mooglyblog.com/ghost-squish/
• web.archive.org/web/20251217163042/https://www.mooglyblog.com/spooky-eyeball-squish/
• web.archive.org/web/20251221223532/https://www.mooglyblog.com/bubbling-crochet-cauldron-with-lid/
• web.archive.org/web/20260214092906/https://www.mooglyblog.com/candy-corn-door-basket/
• web.archive.org/web/20241101150053/https://www.mooglyblog.com/halloween-monster-candy-bucket/
• web.archive.org/web/20250918185356/https://www.mooglyblog.com/halloween-tentacle-candy-bowl/
• web.archive.org/web/20251214174532/https://www.mooglyblog.com/plush-puff-pumpkin/
• web.archive.org/web/20251212115415/https://www.mooglyblog.com/plush-pumpkin-basket/
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/yarn/stylecraft-special-dk-all-colours
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/yarn/stylecraft-special-aran-all-colours
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/yarn/stylecraft-special-chunky-all-colours
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/yarn/bernat-blanket-300g-all-colours

Sources checked 3 October 2026. Label facts come from the linked references; worked purchase examples and arithmetic are our own illustrations.