How to turn a skein of yarn in to a ball if you have no equipment.

There are plenty of expensive accessories you can buy to assist turning a skein of hand dyed yarn into a ball. But if you are starting out and have none of these, this is the simplest way.

1. Lay your skein of yarn flat on a table and identify the 3-4 'figure of 8' loops used to stop the yarn from tangling whilst in the dye pot.

One of these will hold the start and end of the yarn.

Carefully separate each of these from the bulk of the yarn and snip to release and remove them. 

2. Have a patient friend hold your yarn stretched between two hands, or stretch it between two chair backs.

3. Locate your two ends. One will be on the inside and one will be on the outside of your skein, which has been would as a continuous spiral by the mill. You may need to rearrange and untwist/smooth your yarn a little to find which is the outside or easiest end to pull from.

It should smoothly release from the bulk of the skein, and not pull through, tangle or twist the yarn as it comes.

4 a) I start by winding a little yarn around 2 fingers.

b) Then release this from my fingers and wind around the middle.

c) I keep going until I have a roughly oval shape.

d) Then I turn the oval 90 degrees and start winding around that, maybe 10-20 times.

e) I turn 90 degrees again and wind some more.

f) And I turn 90 degrees once more and wind. Your 'ball' will look like a rough square with some messy bits on the corner.

g) I start to shape the blob into a ball by winding around the messy bits to smooth them out. Instead of turning the ball 90 degrees, I adjust it by smaller amounts (20-40 degrees) in all directions and wind 10-20 times before adjusting direction again, until all the rough edges are balled off. 

h) You can see that the yarn has been wound in all directions from the criss-crossing effect on the surface.

i) I keep going until your yarn is used up.

5 To wind, I hold the ball steady in my non-dominant hand and use my dominant hand to hold the strand at tension, which circles around in a smooth motion, a bit like a moon orbiting a planet, depositing yarn on to the ball. When I adjust direction I do it by rotating the ball held in my non dominant hand. 

And there you have it! How to wind a ball from a skein.