Yesterday during the attack of Life that kept me from blogging, I did find a minute to answer a question about winding balls from hanks. I tried my best to describe how to do it, but was very frustrated not to be able to show how. So this morning The Small Child and I dug out some scrap yarn and took some pictures.

Start by spreading out the fingers of your left hand (right hand if you're a lefty). Stash the free end (as opposed to the end attached to your hank) between your index and middle finger.



Wind the yarn in a figure 8 around your thumb and little finger until you've got a hefty butterfly going.

Once it's too big to wind this way, take it off your fingers and fold it in half. Note that I've still got the free end between my fingers. The end that I'm winding is hanging down in front.

Now hold the folded butterfly in your left hand, with your finger sort of encapsulating the thing. (When I teach kids to do this, I have them think about holding a baby bird in a sugar cage.) Winding your yarn around your fingers, begin to build up a ball. Wind a bit in one direction, then shift your grip and wind in another.



The goal is to make a very soft, squishy ball so that the yarn isn't flattened or stretched out. When my fingers are full (like in the photo above), I pull my fingers out, rotate the ball in my left hand and start winding again in a different direction.



Eventually the ball will outgrow your grip size and you won't be able to fit it between your fingers as you wind. Don't worry. Continue to wind LOOSELY until you're through, preferably over at least one finger to introduce extra "give" into the wind so the yarn isn't stressed. If you want to use the thing as a center pull, avoid capturing the free end as you wind. (It's just above my thumb in the photo above). Keep going until you've finished.



The end product. A nice fluffy ball. You can see the center pull end trailing off past my thumb, and the outside end trailing off the bottom.

Even though I have a ball winding machine, I wind more than half of the yarn I use this way, mounting the hanks on my swift, but making the balls by hand. The biggest exception is lace weight yarn. Anything that comes in hanks of more than 700 yards is going to take an eon and a half to wind by hand. That's worth hauling out the winder and wrestling it into submission.