Whether you knit or not, you can still pile balls of gorgeous yarn in a basket to enrich a room with sophisticated and surprising colors and textures.
Choose your fiber palette at a yarn shop and wind as many as five strands into one multi-hued, multi-textured ball. Some yarn shops will do the winding for you for a fee, or even free if you buy their yarn.
To wind the balls yourself you’ll need a yarn ball winder, a simple gadget that is available at craft stores or on the Internet for less than $50. Simply attach the winder to a table. Attach the ends of the pull skeins (the tidy bundles that most yarn comes in) to the winder and wind.
If you want to blend a hank (old-styled coiled bundles) of yarn into your decorative ball, you’ll need to ask a pal for help. Place the hank around your helper’s arms, take the end of the yarn and roll the hank into a ball. (Yarn shops use another gadget called a swift to roll hanks into balls.) Attach the end of the ball to the yarn ball winder as you would a pull skein.
Elizabeth Edwards is managing editor at Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine.lissa@traversemagazine.com