How to Make a Small Center-Pull Ball of Yarn

Hi everyone. I'm Jen Lucas for The Knitting Circle. Let's make a small center pull ball of yarn For some knitting projects, you might only need a tiny amount of yarn if you're making a swatch or even a small toy, or especially if you're working on an intarsia project where you have to be working several different colors along one row, you would want to have several small balls of yarn to make it easier to manage. So knowing how to make a small center pull ball of yarn is something that's great to know how to do. And actually it's super easy. So let's get started. So here I have an already made center pull ball of yarn and you can see here's my tail that's in the center and you see I can just pull the yarn right out of this. So if this was attached to my knitting I could just keep pulling as I go. And it's just a tiny little center pull ball of yarn. So I'm going to start with a larger ball of yarn. Obviously you would have a lot of yarn that then you would just want to make a small center pull ball with. So to start, I've got a little bit of a knot there. I going to go ahead and cut that off. So to start, I usually just leave a little bit of a tail. You don't need it to be too long cause you can always pull more out later since it's the center pull. And then depending on the size that you need you can either use two fingers or four like this. So I'll start by showing you two. So I just hold my fingers like this and then just sort of do a figure eight with the yarn until I get the amount of yarn that I want. So we'll just say, that's good then I'm just going to pinch it here slide it off and then hold it together. And then still using this yarn that's going to my large ball of yarn. I'm just going to wrap this around a few times to secure it. And I'll just take my little scissors here and trim. You can then take this little end and tuck it in just to sort of secure it into place. And there you go. We've made a tiny little center pull as you can see now could just pull the yarn out and use it for knitting. So then if you wanted to make a larger one if you had a little bit larger of a swatch or toy or something that you needed a little bit more yarn you could use four fingers and you just hold them like this. I bring the yarn over and then just go in a figure eight this way. And then you would wrap around a lot more times cause you'd be making a larger ball of central pull ball of yarn, but it's the same idea. Then once you have the amount of yarn that you want on there, you can just pinch, wiggle your fingers out. While I'm still pinching, I'm just taking this tail and bringing it over and winding it around a few times. Go ahead and snip that. And then tuck it in. And again, this is really great if you're working out a little swatch or intarsia and you can see here that this one is quite a bit bigger than this one. I did pull some yarn out of this one already. So yeah, you can either use two fingers or four to make your center pull ball of yarn. There you go. Making a small center pull ball of yarn Isn't something that you're necessarily going to need to do every day with your knitting projects but it is a great skill to have in your knitting toolbox for when you are working on a project that needs a small amount of yarn or if you're doing something like an intarsia project I really love making these little small central pull balls of yarn for things like swatches or what I'm working on. Maybe a little stripe in a toy or something. It just makes it so much easier to manage the yarn. I'm Jen Lucas, for The Knitting Circle. I hope that you enjoyed this video. If you did enjoy this video be sure to check out the other videos on our website. We have lots of other great technique videos that you can add to your knitting toolbox.