While waiting for my car to be done, and that’s another issue, I found an article online that showed me how I could add twist into the yarn while crocheting. I’ve got to try this on some of the more frustrating yarns I’ve crochet with. Yarns, in which I love the colors and softness, but they untwisted so horribly that I hate crocheting with them. The yarn was splitty and it slowed me down. This doesn’t happen when I knit. I felt cheated as a crocheter, like the yarn world didn’t seem to care about me.

I have been searching for a solution to this problem for years and just never managed to put in the right search words. I was confident in my Google Foo and so thought the information either just wasn’t out there, or that a solution didn’t exist.

I had just started another baby blanket because I didn’t want to drag out my almost done blanket in the mechanic’s waiting room and pondered once again what on earth could be done.  My usual word-around (I refuse to call this a solution) was to roll the skein of yarn to add twist. I would stop every few inches of stitches and roll the skein over several times. This is irritating. If I would just doing a small granny square I could easily flip the square around on the hook by waving it in a circle and I’d get twist in the yarn that way. This doesn’t work once the granny square blanket gets to a certain size. It’s irritating. It’s frustrating. A yarn that I would normally love becomes my nemesis and I just can’t crochet as fast as I’d like to be able to. This is why I gravitated to certain yarns over the years when making the endless parade of baby blankets for the babies that just keep coming into this family.  Anyway while pondering something Abby Franquemont said during her spinning video.  She was explaining about putting twist in the yarn and that you could keep or lose that twist depending on how you wound the yarn or fiber onto a stick.  My DVD was at home so I once again did a Google search and for whatever reason typed in something different.

I came across a blog post by Doris Chan that told me exactly what I needed to know. I’m trying not to be irritated that I didn’t figure this out by myself because in the back of my mind, I had thought this might be the answer.  But I didn’t know which direction I needed to try and was never willing to experiment. It turns out that if I’m using the yarn from the outside of the cake, it’s this way:

I positioned the skein in the direction Doris showed, started crocheting off the outside of the skein, and EUREKA! So far, I appear to be putting in just enough twist to match what I’m taking out by crocheting. If the yarn gets too twisty, I can simply flip the cake over for a bit. It’s like magic.

I’m going to try this with some of the other yarns I loved for their color and softness, perfect for baby blankets, but HATED because they were hard to crochet with. I’m looking at you Yarn Bee Soft Secret and Caron Simply Soft.  I didn’t want the mess of trying to crochet from the outside of a skein, so I wound the Yarn Bee into cakes and placed them in the project bag with the correct side up.

Pardon me for saying this, but today I am a very happy hooker. Thank you Abby and Doris! You ladies have saved my crochet sanity.