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What Are Yarn Bowls for, and How to Make Your Own

July 21, 2015 by Sarah White

polymer clay yarn bowlI’ve been seeing a lot of things about yarn bowls lately. These bowls, which are often ceramic but can be made DIY style out of just about any material that’s a bowl, are a way to hold you yarn while you work.

The benefits of using a yarn bowl, according to this post from My Poppet, include keeping your yarn ball from getting away from you as you knit. They also keep dust, pet hair or whatever else might be on your knitting surface from getting into you yarn, and they can be really pretty, too.

She offers some great tips for choosing a yarn bowl, noting that they should be heavy enough not to tip over, have a guide for the yarn so that it can be removed without cutting (instead of just a hole in the side of the bowl) and it needs to be made out of material that won’t snag the yarn.

You can buy yarn bowls on etsy or from local artists who make them, and there are lots of ways to hack a yarn bowl, from putting a binder clip on the side of a regular bowl (again not ideal because you can’t get the yarn out of the clip without cutting it, but at least you can take the clip off the bowl if you need to get your project away from the bowl) to this fun one shared by Shelli over at the Crochet site recently. Off the Hook for You used polymer clay to make a yarn bowl, which is an amazing, fun looking project that the kids can help out with, too.

Have you ever used a yarn bowl? Do you like it? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Next Pattern:

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  • Make Your Own Marl with the Sprinkle Tee Knitting Pattern
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Comments

  1. Regina says

    July 21, 2015 at 4:18 pm

    Why can’t you get the yarn out of a binder clip without cutting it? If you feed yarn through the metal arms of the clip, you can remove the arms from the body (by squeezing them together) to remove the yarn. Am I missing something?

  2. Lindsey says

    July 22, 2015 at 4:13 am

    Regina, I was just thinking the same.

  3. Alix says

    July 30, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    I think the wool is to be threaded through the metal loops of the clip rather than the actual part that clips onto the bowl

  4. Karen Seemuth says

    August 20, 2016 at 12:42 pm

    Regina, Lindsey and Alix,

    Yes! You just squeeze together the silver arms part of the clip and you can remove it from the black part that it clamped to the bowl.

Have you read?

Embellish Your Knit Dishcloth with Flowers

One great thing to knit when the weather is warm (or honestly any other time) is dishcloths and washcloths. They are fun and easy projects and a great way to play with new skills. Pretty washcloths make cleaning a tiny bit more fun, and they’re great to have on hand as a quick addition to a store-bought gift. 

The Daisy Delight Dishcloth from Yarnspirations is a fun one for using leftover bits of green in your cotton yarn stash. What looks like the bottom in the picture is actually the left side as you knit it, and each little color section is worked with its own ball of yarn, intarsia style. 

That’s a little fiddly for a washcloth, but the effect is cute, and it’s a simple way to learn the basics of intarsia knitting (as well as reading a chart) if you don’t already have those skills. 

One the knitting is done, you add the flowers with a bit of lazy daisy embroidery, which is really easy to do even if you’re not that into embroidery. You could also potentially add flowers in duplicate stitch if you’d rather. 

This may be the most work you’ve put into a dishcloth, but isn’t it adorable? It would be fun to use as a hand towel through the spring and summer, and if you already have some leftover green yarn from other projects it should be pretty easy to do. 

You could also take this same concept and make it different colors. All dark green stems with stars on top might be reminiscent of Christmas trees, or brown with daisy stitch on top in different colors could be trees in the fall. 

However you stitch it, this looks like a fun little project for knitters who are comfortable with intarsia and reading charts or who are ready to try those skills. 

You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

Book Review – Dishcloths for Special Days [Knitting]

Book Review – Holiday Knit Dishcloths

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