I’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.
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?
Regina, I was just thinking the same.
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
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.