If you have yarn in hanks, you’ll need to wind them into balls of yarn before you can use them for your crocheting.
From TheHomeMaker, I found this really sweet video – a simple but most useful video-tutorial. And as you can see, a hank of yarn can easily turn into a tangled mess, so be very careful! TheHomeMaker just puts the hank over her knees and winds it up into a ball.
I’ve used the back of a chair, and another time put the hank over the back and one arm of the chair, to work with a hank of yarn and it has worked fine with sport, DK, fingering weight yarn.
But I have had to deal with lace (2-ply) yarn that’s over a kilometer long. I figured that will surely become a mess without a swift. So I had a swift made quickly out of scraps of wood, as described in an earlier blogpost.
The truly difficult part here is placing the hank on the swift in such a way that the strands don’t overlap so much that they would tangle when you start pulling. With 1,600 meters of fine yarn, that’s not easy. Luckily, the hank is tied in at least three places and in three sections. This way it was easier to see which direction the strands go.
Once on the swift, I untie or cut the ends of the yarn and try to see which end is the easiest to unwind. This is also very tricky. If I could pull the yarn a few feet without tangling, then I work with that end of the yarn with some confidence.
Then winding into a ball can begin.

Leave a long tail across your palm then start winding around your fingers in figure 8, maybe a dozen or so times.
You must tape the tail end of the yarn onto a small piece of cardboard or paper so that you can find it when it gets buried under all that winding!
(Thanks to Lori for this tip!)

Start winding around the folded yarn. In the beginning, wind over your finger so you don't wind too tightly.
I just love doing this. Winding a ball of yarn has a meditative and relaxing effect on me. At night, I find that I sleep easily by imagining that I was winding a ball of yarn – the equivalent of counting sheep!


























