Using a yarn bowl

One of my tips is to use a yarn bowl, and the reason is simple: it stops your ball of yarn rolling away while you are working. The trick to using a yarn bowl is to avoid tension between your work and the ball of yarn in the bowl, as this will vary with the size of the ball. The tension needed to keep your stitches even, both for knitting and crochet, should be created by the way you hold your yarn. Pull a manageable length of yarn from the ball in the bowl, and let it lie loose between your hand holding the yarn and the ball of yarn in the bowl.

You do not need a special type of bowl. When I talk about yarn bowls I always describe Holly Golightly using one when she is knitting the red thing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I searched for the scene to get an image of it, an to my delight I discovered that what I remember as a bowl on a high shelf is in fact a wall mounted light fitting! This perfectly illustrates my point: any round vessel will do, as long as it allows the ball of yarn to roll freely when you pull on it to get a loose length of yarn to work with. I simply use any bowl from my kitchen, and I often joke that my favourite meal is a bowl of yarn! For a small project I have used a fancy teacup, and when I’m not at home I use my upturned felt hat.

Yarn bowls are useful for organising yarn for multicolour knitting, and while knitting from the skein is not for everyone, you can place a skein around the outside of a yarn bowl of any kind to keep it from tangling.

That’s all there is to using a yarn bowl!

Holly Golightly’s yarn bowl | Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Yarn Bowl | A yummy dish!

Yarn Bowl | My handy hat