Yarn Put Ups: Different Ways Yarn Is Wound

Hi there, I'm Corrina Ferguson for the Knitting Circle. In this video, I'm gonna show you the difference between a skein, a hank, a ball, or a cake, and yes, we're talking about yarn. So let's get started. Right, so in this video, what I want to talk about is the different put ups of yarn. And they call it a put up, it's the way the yarn's put together or put up. And depending on what put up you have, depends on whether or not you can grab this yarn and immediately knit from it. So we're gonna start with a skein. A skein is usually kind of oval-shaped, like this. And it is the put up that you're gonna see most commonly like in your big box craft stores, all that sort of thing. And these are immediately available for you to knit off of. You will have some yarn that's rolling around on the outside that you can pull from, or if you're very skilled, you can stick your finger into the center of the skein and pull out the center of the skein. Personally, I have never successfully pulled out the center of a skein without making crazy things happen, but it is available for you. And like I said, this is a skein, and this is the most common put up that you will see in craft stores. The second thing that I wanna show you is what's called a ball. And it's the same as a skein, it's ready to knit. It's just ball-shaped instead of skein-shaped. Skein-shaped probably isn't really a thing, but the skeins are usually that oval that we were seeing right here. And the ball shape is very easy to work from. You've got yarn here that you can pull from. And usually you can actually kind of see, it's almost like a donut. Can we see the donut there? See the donut and you can see inside to get the yarn from the center, if you prefer to work from the center of the ball. So that's a lot easier for me and I don't have the trouble that I have with these squirrely skeins. But that would be considered a ball put up. And lots of yarns come in ball put ups. Normally yarns that you see in balls are less yardage. You don't see like huge yardages in a ball. The third type of put up we're gonna talk about is a hank. Now I will tell you right now that I frequently called hanks skeins. People will sometimes use the word hank and skein interchangeably, but a proper skein is this guy, and this is a hank. And what this is, is yarn that is in a big loop. So let's take it apart and see what it looks like. In a big loop, and then it's kinda been twisted. So you see, I got my loop thing here. And there's usually ties around the loops of yarn to keep it from getting tangled. And then people do a twist thing on it which I'm gonna do a little bit unsuccessfully here. I'm not very good at the twisting personally. They do the little twist thing on it, and so you get this kind of put up which is called your hank. This is the one that you can't knit from directly, cause if you do it's gonna make a big mess. A couple of ways to do this to get it to a form that's ready to work with, is you can put the yarn, some people will use like the back of a chair, some people will ask a child or a loved one to sit with them and wrap the yarn loop around their hands and they'll hold it kind of football style, and then unwrap that and wrap it into a ball. The other thing is you can do is you can use a swift. It's called a swift and that is a thing that will hold the big loop of yarn and a ball winder and make what we call a cake. Now, this one is a yarn that came caked to us when we got it. And one of the reasons that this yarn is caked is because they're showing you this beautiful gradient color. We go from the turquoise and into the grays and into that pale silver color. When they're selling this yarn, it's very easy for you to see in this cake format that how the colors go and how pretty that is. And the reason they call it a cake, let me set it this way for you, is because it's cake shaped. It's flat on the top and the bottom, and then it's a circle, so it really is shaped like a cake. When you have a cake like this, you can work the yarn from the outside, there's yarn here, and then there's always yarn in the inside, and you stick your finger in there and find that center and you can pull and work from there. Yarn that's in a hank can easily be wound into a cake. Sometimes I will take yarn that's in a skein or even a ball and I will use my ball winder to wind it into a cake, because I find this the easiest way to work with, but your mileage may vary. The one thing that you just wanna remember is that all of them, the ball, the cake, and the skein, you can start work right away. If you've got a hank, you got a little bit to do before you can start knitting. Thank you so much for joining me to learn about the different put ups of yarn. Check out more great videos on our website.