How to Use a Yarn Ball Maker

Use a yarn ball maker to wind your yarn into an easy-to-use ball.

If you buy yarn, it usually comes in a skein. Some commercial skeins of yarn are meant to use right away, but others require winding or else they can become tangled. If this is the case for your yarn, use a yarn ball maker to wind your skein of yarn into a center-pull ball. This will help keep your yarn from getting tangled and give you an easily portable ball of yarn for your knitting or crochet projects.

Things You'll Need

• Yarn skein
• Yarn ball maker or winder
• Yarn swift (optional)

Instructions

1. Take your skein of yarn and lay it out in a flat oval. Skeins of yarn have small strands of yarn to tie them together in one to four places, depending on their size. Locate these places; if the yarn is scrap yarn that is unattached to the skein, cut it off. If it is a portion of the skein yarn holding the strands together, untie it.

2. Find something to stabilize the skein. The best tool for this is a yarn swift. Yarn swifts are large adjustable objects that hold skeins of varying sizes and rotate around as you pull the yarn off the skein. If you do not own a yarn swift, you can hold the skein around a partner's hands, your own knees if you sit on the floor, or wrap it around a chair or some other piece of furniture. The reason for doing this is that if you simply set the skein on a table the yarn strands will tangle together easily while you wind them into a ball.

3. Take the outside end of the yarn skein and pull it over to your yarn ball winder. Thread the yarn through the guide hole on the winder, which is a small loop of metal on the side of the winder. You will see a small notch in the center cone of the ball winder; slide the end of the yarn into this notch with a few inches to spare hanging off hte edge. This will be the center of your ball, and you will pull from this yarn when you use the ball of yarn later.

4. Turn the handle on the yarn ball maker in order to wind the skeined yarn onto your ball maker. Go slowly enough to avoid tangling on the skein, and continue to turn the handle until you have wound the entire skein.

5. Gently pull the center strand of yarn out of the notch in the cone and lay it onto the top of your yarn ball so you can find it later. Pull the rest of the yarn ball off of the cone slowly to hold its shape. Now you have a center-pull ball of yarn that will sit on a tabletop without rolling off, and you can pull from the center of the ball to avoid tangling of the yarn while you knit or crochet.

References

• Knitpicks: How to Use a Yarn Ball Winder