Winding a Ball from a Hank Without a Swift
Brenda K.B. AndersonDescription
Have you ever wondered how to use yarn that is wound into a hank? Or perhaps you’ve never heard of a “hank” before? In this video, Brenda explains what a hank is and how you cannot crochet directly from a hank of yarn. Instead, you must wind it into a ball first. Many people use special ball-winding equipment for this: a ball-winder and a swift. These tools can be expensive, so Brenda offers another way to wind your hank into a ball without any special equipment.
In this video, Brenda demonstrates how she likes to wind a hank into a ball by using her knees. There are alternatives to this—you can use the back of a chair, a large lampshade, two jugs of juice on a table (these must be full and set apart from each other), or a friend’s set of arms.
Brenda begins by untwisting the hank so that it becomes a large loop. She examines the loop to make sure that it isn’t twisted before placing it around her knees. Brenda shows us how to find the smaller strands of yarn that tie the hank into place, and how to cut and remove them. She explains that the two ends of the hank are usually are tied together to one of the shorter ties, and that you need to untie or cut them loose to begin winding. As she winds the yarn into a ball, she follows the arc of the hank around her knees instead of pulling the yarn from the center. This helps to avoid tangling as the ball is wound.
Brenda mentions that you can wind a center-pull ball instead (see this video for a demonstration), but that since she uses a yarn-bowl to contain her yarn while crocheting, she is just winding a regular ball.
Those beautiful hanks of yarn will no longer intimidate you now that you know how to use them!
You might be wondering why I'm sitting like this. The reason I'm sitting like this is because I'm preparing to wind this hank of yarn into a ball without using a swift or a ball winder. So, if you just thought yourself, what's a swift? What's a ball winder? What's a hank? What's going on? That's okay. I'm gonna explain that to you. So, this is a hank of yarn. The hank refers to the way that it's kind of looped up and put into this sort of twisted shape. And if you buy one of these at the yarn store and you bring it home and you try to crochet from it, it can be a big, huge mess. So, you never wanna crochet directly from this. You wanna turn it into a ball of yarn first. So, they do sell something called a swift which is a way to place your yarn and to keep it from tangling. And then a ball winder. That's a special tool that you can use to, you hook the yarn into it and then you can turn it into a ball of yarn off of the swift. But those are, can be kind of expensive. So, I wanted to give you another alternative. A way to just use your knees to turn your hank into a ball of yarn. So, the first thing you're gonna do when you get your hank and you're ready to go is you are going to look for the end that has little loops sticking out like this and you're gonna pop that through and then you can see it turns into a big loop of yarn. This is what it actually looks like when it's undone. Okay? So, you wanna look at it and make sure when you undo that, that you don't accidentally have some strands here reaching over there. If it looks like a mess, then you need to take the time to look on the inside. Just make sure there aren't any strands of yarn crossing over to the other side. Then at that point, you can put it right on top of your knees like this. And you will look around and see if you can find all of these little horizontal ties. So, that's what's keeping this all organized. And we are gonna look for those first. And then after we've located where those are, we're going to look for the end of our yarn, which is right here. It's usually in a bigger knot and oftentimes it is tied to one of those horizontal ties here. So, we're going to make sure that our loop is all untwisted. So, you don't want it to be twisted on your legs, you want it to be like a straight band of loops like this. Okay. And then you are going to go ahead and cut those horizontal ties. You can pull them off. There's one. There's another one, and this one only has three. And here's the last one that is attached to the ends of our yarn. So, we'll pull that out too. Just pull that out. And now, we are able to start winding. So, you can take either end. I think my, this look, this actually got a little twisted here so I'm gonna untwist that just like that. You want it to be as straight as you can. And I'm gonna start with this end because it looks like it's coming from, actually, let me check. Either end is fine to start with. You just wanna make sure that it is not tied or it's not twisted around anything. So, we're gonna start with this end. And you can make a sutter pole ball if you want to because I have a yarn bowl. I am just gonna ball it up how I regularly do. The yarn bowl will allow you to have a big ball yarn in here and it can kind of spin freely in there and it doesn't roll around on your floor. You can actually just use a regular bowl too to do that. Just a large heavy bowl. So, I'm just gonna start by wrapping the yarn around two of my fingers like this and just kind of following it around like that. And then when I get maybe 10 or 15 loops, then I'm gonna pinch them and start wrapping in this direction here. And then, I get that all filled up and then I hold the top and bottom and I wrap in the opposite direction. So, switching directions like that will help you keep your loops together. I'm gonna switch again. And then, when your ball gets big enough, then you don't have to worry so much about switching directions. You can just kind of constantly move the ball around a little bit as you put your loops on it. So, you can see when I'm winding this, I'm not just holding it in the middle and pulling like this because that has a tendency to snag the other pieces of yarn and kind of pull them up. I find that, that kind of causes things to tangle a little bit. So, I'm just kind of following it around in a circle like this. And if it's difficult for you to be in this position, if you don't particularly wanna wind it on your knees, you can find a large lampshade or you can use the back of a chair. You can use your buddies two arms if they're willing to hang out and watch a movie while you do this. I have also used two one gallon jugs of juice that I've just set on the table here and here and then I've coiled it around those two. You know, it just has to be heavy enough that it's not going to tip over as you're winding. All right, so I'm just gonna continue winding and I will show you what it looks like when I finish up. And there we have it. It is a beautiful ball of yarn wound from a hank without using a swift or a ball winder.
How about a technique for people whose legs can't bend like that? I dislocated my hip some years ago - my days of sitting like the instructor are loooong over.