I’m sorry this is my third post in two days about the same pattern but the way that the specifics of the yarn are written isn’t making sense to me.
Hi! She literally means knit with 5 strands of yarn together. I am currently knitting a blanket and I am using 2 strands of yarn. It makes your project much thicker and warmer as well. 
Good luck!
Thank you!! My problem is that finding 9k yards of sport weight yarn is really difficult and really expensive. If I wanted to just buy thicker yarn and use one strand what weight do you think that would be? Would the dress still look as nice?
But that doesn’t quite add up if you look at the gauge… it says 30 sts to 10cm. So… Something must be off. (is it possible it’s a wonky translation…?)
on the other hand 30 sts in 10cm on 3.5 mm needles with a single strand of sport weight sounds a little tight to me but realistic.
I’d guess she means something more like five separate skeins joined END TO END and something got lost in translation…
It’s five strands of this very thin yarn, Zegna Baruffa Softly held together. The numbers for yardage a bit confusing but a cone of the yarn is 1531 yards. The designer is saying that at 5 strands held together, that works out to 280 effective yards per cone.
If you need 10 cones that’s 2800 yards of yarn length. So that’s the number of yards of a substitute yarn that you would need. It’s worth checking with the designer to make sure. Send a message on Ravelry to check on this.
The gauge is measured over the pattern stitch which includes cables that pull in the knit fabric.
