Knitting

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

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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.

Comments

  1. 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?

  3. 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. 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.

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Beyond Basic Pumpkin Knitting Patterns

Over the years I have shared a lot of pumpkin knitting patterns, and I’ve knit and crocheted a lot of pumpkins myself. But it feels like there are always more fun things to try with knit pumpkins, so this year I wanted to look a little more beyond basic stockinette or ribbed pumpkins and share some pumpkin patterns with cables, bobbles and colorwork. 

In the cable collection we’ve got these cute little basic cable and ribbed pumpkins from Elly Bear Knits. There are two sizes that make a wide, flat pumpkin and a taller round pumpkin. Both are worked in the round as a tube that’s cinched top and bottom when you’re done, and they use bulky weight yarn. 

Another cute cable pumpkin knitting pattern comes from Gray Bear Akswokrat. This one is knit flat and it looks like a chunky yarn but you could use other weights to make pumpkins of different sizes. This one also has an I-cord stem and uses yarn to cinch up the sections of the pumpkin, giving it a more natural look. 

Add some bobbles to your pumpkins with this design from Autumn Shelter Makes. Also worked in the round in a tube, it features a repeating pattern of bobbles and uses yarn wrapped around the outside to make segments. This one looks like worsted weight yarn to me. 

Of course there’s nothing that says your pumpkin has to be a single color, so let’s throw in some colorwork. I love the look of the Cozy Fall Pumpkin knitting pattern from South Stitch Girls. The little leather loop adds a rustic touch but you could also just add a stick. These pumpkins have five colorwork options and are worked in worsted weight yarn in the round. 

There’s also the Autumn Fair Isle Trio pumpkins pattern from Equestriann Style, which has three different sizes of pumpkins with four colorwork designs. They are worked in super bulky yarn in the round and look good with high contrast or more muted color combinations.