Saturday, January 17, 2015

Splitting A Ball in Half

Today I finished a scarf that I made with four different balls of Hobby Lobby's I Love This Wool, but before I show you the picture, I am going to describe my method for splitting balls in half without a ball winder, a swift, or a scale.


This is the ball in it's original state. One could just start knitting from the inside or the outside, since it's a center pull ball, which is perfect for my purposes. The first step is to find the inside end and the outside end, holding them together, start winding a ball, just manually. 


At the end of all that you will have a single ball held double. Cut the string in half when you get to the very end of the original ball. If you are making two at a time socks you can stop here, and can knit both socks from the same ball, meaning that if you are knitting toe up you will know exactly when to end in order to use up as much of the yarn as possible. I prefer knitting two at a time toe up, on 40" cable needles, size US 1. I think that they go fast. I will describe my vanilla sock recipe in a later post. 


 Next take both ends of the ball and start winding two separate balls. If the yarn gets twisted, simply untwist it. I never find it to become terribly troublesome.


Continue winding into two separate balls. 



Eventually you will end up with two completely separate balls.


Tadaa! A ball split in half with no fancy equipment whatsoever.

After I split the ball in half today I finished crocheting a scarf. I used half of four different balls of Hobby Lobby's I Love This Wool, so I have exactly enough to make an exactly identical scarf, which I think that I will end up doing. I would just like to say that I did not love the I Love This Wool though. I thought it was too splitty, and it kept splitting on me. It did come in a variety of different plies in the Naturals line. I started with a solid brown, then did a section of three plies of brown with one ply cream, then half and half, two plies brown, two plies cream, and finally three plies cream and one ply brown. I think it ended up being a really interesting gradient, and I may have to experiment with making gradients like this using handspun, since I have never really played around with anything more than Navajo plying or two ply, so playing with more plies would be fun. Here is the finished scarf. I used a size US J crochet hook, and used the berry stitch, which is just alternating double crochet and single crochet stitches every other stitch and then double crochet in the single crochet and single crochet in the double crochet in the next row.


I came home this evening and made an especially yummy dinner. I roasted peppers, tomatoes, and chickpeas in the oven, sprinkling them with garlic salt and pepper. I sauteed zucchini, yellow squash, and red onion and minced garlic in a skillet on the stove top, and then I cooked some gluten free spiral pasta. I waited until each component was done then I mixed them all together with olive oil and Parmesan cheese in a plastic container, I ate half and saved the other half for tomorrow. It was really delicious, and I might write out a more specific recipe, but I don't really want this to become a food blog, since I think my crafting is more interesting than my cooking. I'm also not always exact when I cook, so making recipes is not my forte. 

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