Why is yarn not sold in ball form when people obviously prefer that?
I buy yarn all the time and have to sit with a yarn baller, or sit and ball up the yarn by hand. Why don’t manufacturers sell it already balled since a majority of people buying it have to do that?
Thank you for the suggestion Hizway! I will have to give that a try.
Mistress Eris, as Hizway implied, the reason most people ball their yarn is it gets tangled easily otherwise. Unless of course, Hizways solution works!
Oh, and some skeins of natural fibers are balled differently than what you find in Walmart or JoAnnes and still need to be balled because they don’t have a thread in the middle.
The way yarn is put up depends on the spinning mill. The older mills may not have the machinery available to put the yarn up into balls. And as it is pre-wound yarns leave a lot to be desired, IMHO, I’ve found far too many of them with flaws that fall in the middle of a pattern sequence requiring the knitter to pick back a row to remove them and start with a new ball. And far too often pulling these pre-wound marvels results in a mass of *yarn vomit* because one or more strands got a bit too long or out of sequence and wound around other layers in the ball. Plus, not all pre-wound balls are designed to be center pull balls (again, that’s an expensive piece of machinery that many mills cannot or choose not to afford).
The yarn industry in large scale production has largely moved to third world countries where cheap means good. Most yarn one finds in true hanks or skeins tends to be local, smaller mills that cannot afford to have very machine there is because the technical expertise to repair them is no longer in the US or Canada.
To be honest, winding your yarn into balls is a worthwhile activity. It does allow you to wind your own center pull balls and it lets you find the knots, slubs, and other things you don’t want in your finished work (ever had a skein with a lot of trash in it that you have to pick out? Much easier when you’re winding it than when you’re knitting with it). I’m grateful we can still find reasonably priced yarns, and I use mostly natural yarns (very seldom do I use acrylics) and since I am and I know many shepherds, I’ll pay the price and do the winding to support the effort.
Knit and Crochet Now Demo: Boye Electric Yarn Ball Winder
