A hazard of a center pull yarn ball and how to deal with it
Center pull balls of yarn are great – you can pull yarn out from the middle of them and not have the ball roll around the room. (I wouldn’t use them for laceweight yarn, though.) There’s just one hitch*: sometimes a snarl will emerge from the middle instead of smooth untangled yarn. A lot of knitters refer to this as yarn barf, as it is messy and annoying.
It turns out that there’s a handy trick to dealing with this in most cases, and it involves knowing what’s happened inside the yarn ball to make it happen. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for a while, and this week turns out to be a good time to do it as the replacement for our desktop computer won’t arrive until next week.
I do apologize for the poor photo quality: this yarn barf emerged from my ball of yarn at a moment when the cat was sleeping on my ankles and I didn’t feel like disturbing her to go find better background and light. I think what’s going on is still clear enough.
It’s a basic fiber arts principle that yarn under tension is yarn that is under control and will not tangle. I think I first learned a similar phrase from Abby Franquemont, but she put into words something that I’ve known for a long time.
A brand new ball of yarn has placed all of the yarn in that ball under enough tension to keep it from tangling. So how does yarn barf happen?
As yarn is pulled out of the middle of a center pull ball, the gap formed by the removed yarn means that the yarn in the middle is no longer under tension. It can wiggle around as the yarn next to it is pulled out. Yarn that can wiggle around is yarn that can snarl. Oops!
Fortunately, it turns out that since the two ends of the yarn are usually still attached to something, there’s a limited number of ways that the yarn is likely to snarl and we can use that to our advantage.
Figure 1: If one has slack string where the two ends are attached to separate objects (for our purposes, a knitting or crochet project at one end and the ball of yarn at the other), these are the two most likely knots to form (it gets a bit more complicated after this, but not very much). Knot A is a slip knot, formed by crossing the yarn over itself to make a loop and then pulling another loop through. Knot B is an overhand knot, in this case formed by folding the yarn back on itself, pretending it’s a single strand and making an ordinary overhand knot.
A is easier to undo when tight than B. Fortunately for our purposes, the most common kind of knot at the heart of yarn barf is the slip knot (A). (At least, that’s my impression from my own experience.) This post is all about the yarn barf formed with a slip knot at its heart.
Because yarn that’s not under tension likes to tangle, if there’s a slip knot in a center pull ball, it will lasso a bunch of loose loops of yarn, tighten up, and pull it all out as a lump like this:
Figure 2: Here I have a clump of yarn barf. One end of the yarn is attached to my knitting (but it could just as well be crochet) and the other is coming out of the yarn ball. I’ve labeled the visible yarn at points A, B, and X.
X marks the spot where a slip knot has grabbed a bunch of loose loops, tightened up, and pulled them out of the middle of the center pull ball.
I’m going to grab the untangled section of yarn that’s attached to my knitting at point A. Then I’m going to hold the untangled yarn that’s coming from the yarn ball at point B. I’m going to gently tug point B away from point A to pull the lassoed loops out of the slip knot. I’m not going to tug point A at all; that will just tighten the snarl.
Then I’ll wind the untangled yarn around the outside of my center pull ball and see how things look.
Figure 3: Well, that’s an improvement. There’s still a snarl, but the situation is much simpler. This looks as if it’s been reduced to a simple, large slip knot, but I’m not certain. I’m going to hold points A and B again, tug B away from point A, and see what happens. I’m not going to tug point A at all; that will just tighten the snarl.
Figure 4: Well, that’s interesting. There is a long folded over loop that I’ve labeled Y that had been lassoed by the tiny slip knot at point X. This is actually a nice illustration of what I mean: the end of the loop labeled Y was inside the slip knot until I tugged it out.
Now comes the one really tricky moment. Sometimes a slip knot that’s gotten really tight won’t come undone easily and needs to be loosened up with the sharp end of a pin or needle. But usually I can grab points A and B once more and pull them apart to make the slip knot come undone entirely. At this point, it’s okay to tug on A as well as B.
Figure 5: That worked. The slip knot came undone the way slip knots do.
The snarl has been completely fixed by tugging on the yarn a few times and winding the untangled yarn around the yarn ball. It’s simple but not easy unless you know what you’re doing.
*pun intended.