Working with Tight Twist Yarn

When you have yarn with a tight twist, how you work with the yarn can make a big impact on how the yarn goes into your project. What I mean by that is sometimes when you pull yarn from the ball/cake, you inadvertently add extra twist to the yarn. Although this is problematic with any yarn, when you have yarn that is already tightly twisted, adding in more twist can make the yarn start to kink up on itself, which can be a frustrating experience. Not only that, but if the extra twist goes into the knitted object, the unbalanced yarn can create bias in the fabric. Probably not something you want!

Do you wind the yarn into a cake? If so, do you pull from the center (or use a center-pull ball) or do you pull the yarn from the outside? For years, I pulled yarn from the outside because I liked keeping the cake neat, and pulling from the center meant that the more yarn that was used, the more the cake would collapse on itself, sometimes creating tangles. But the way I was pulling yarn from the outside was adding extra twist to the yarn, which also caused problems. (Pulling from the center does add a little twist.)

I had the cake sitting either beside me or on the floor and I was essentially pulling the yarn up off the cake while the cake remained in the same place. This is what creates extra twist. I finally got tired of it and decided to try pulling from the center. And although I still have cakes collapse on themselves, ultimately this is a better experience. But the best way to not add extra twist to the yarn is actually to pull from the outside, but to do so smoothly. How can you do that?

You need the yarn cake to travel with the yarn rather than remaining stationary. If you spin the yarn cake while the yarn is coming off of it, the yarn is being smoothly drawn from the cake and not getting extra twist. You can do this by using a yarn spinner or a yarn bowl.

Although I don't have one yet, a knit spinner from Craftiness is definitely on my wishlist. (And it looks like it'll remain on my wishlist for a while as the Craftiness shop owner is moving and has the shop on vacation mode right now. I've linked to a sold listing so you can see what I'm talking about.) Other shops have yarn spinners as well, under various names: there's this one, this one, this one, this one, and this double one, for example. The basic idea is that it allows the yarn cake to turn as you are pulling from it.

Yarn bowls come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and materials. The idea here is that you want a hole or groove that holds the working yarn and the bowl to allow the yarn to turn while you're pulling. Here are a few that caught my eye, but just do a search for "yarn bowl" and you'll find lots of options: pretty ceramic bowl, one with a cat, a Doctor Who one, and a lovely wooden one.

I also recently got a tip that helps a bit when you are pulling yarn from the center of the cake to keep it from collapsing on itself so much. This tip came from Ted, who is part of my local knitting group: I had given him a cake of yarn to knit a sample of one of my patterns (thanks, Ted!) and put the label around the cake; the label wasn't long enough to tape it on, so I wrapped a rubber band around it. When Ted was working with the yarn, he left the label and rubber band on and pulled from the center. As the yarn was used, the rubber band tightened, which tightened the cake and didn't allow it to collapse. I tried it myself and Ted was right: it works really well! Thank you for the excellent tip, Ted!

So if you're having problems with extra twist getting into your yarn while you're working with it, take a moment to consider how you're getting the yarn from the cake/ball to the needles.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The content in this post was first featured in my newsletter (June 5, 2015). If you'd like to keep up to date on my designs and yarn and receive content like this right in your email inbox, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter.