I often get asked about the best way to work with two yarns at once. So, in this post, I’ll talk about the pros and cons of three different ways of working with a double yarn.

Of course, for any amigurumi pattern, you can crochet with two yarns at once, use a bigger hook and follow the pattern… and you’ll end up with a bigger animal! Fun! (shown above: a giant Nelson the Owl!)

Working with two balls of yarn

The most obvious way of working with two yarns at once is to simply hold two strands of yarn together from two separate balls of yarn.

advantages

• If you purchase your yarn already in balls, you don’t have to do much… just find the ends and go!
• If you want to do some interesting yarn combinations (such as hold one strand of plain yarn together with one strand of beaded yarn- which I’ve done when knitting a felted bag), no additional work needs to be done.
• Since the balls of yarn are independent, it’s okay if one ball is longer/shorter than another. Just work on a new second ball when one runs out.
• You can hand-wind your balls of yarn. Since you can work from the outside of the yarn, there’s no need to make center-pull balls (which either require a ball winder or a specialized hand-winding technique).

disadvantages

• Balls can sometimes be unruly. With this technique, some people struggle with keeping both balls of yarn in the same place, or keeping them from becoming hopelessly tangled. If you want to avoid this, consider winding two center-pull balls, and only working from the center. This eliminates (at least lessens the amount of) the ‘rolling-around factor’.
• If you purchase your yarns in skeins, you’ll need to wind two skeins at a time to work in this technique. This can sometimes be inconvenient.
• If you’re working on a small project that doesn’t need two balls worth of yarn, this technique requires modification. You can divide your yarn in half, and work with two smaller balls, but in my opinion, this eliminates the ‘easy advantage’ of this technique.

Work from two ends of a center-pull ball

A second technique is to work from both ends of a center-pull ball: holding the yarn that comes from the center together with the yarn that comes from the outside.

advantages

• You only need to wind one ball of yarn at a time: particularly great if your project requires only one ball of yarn, or an odd number of balls.
• You can do this ‘straight off the shelf’ with many yarns packaged as balls – most are center-pull.

disadvantages

• You’ll need to make center-pull balls… which either require a ball winder or a specialized hand-winding technique.
• This, like working with two balls at once, can sometimes become tangled and a little unruly.

Winding two balls of yarn together

A third technique is to wind two balls of yarn together, and then knit or crochet with the two ends.

advantages

• This technique is easy to work from: no ends or stray balls to get tangled.
• You can hand-wind your balls of yarn. Since you can work from the outside of the yarn, there’s no need to make center-pull balls (which either require a ball winder or a specialized hand-winding technique).
• If you purchase your yarn in skeins, winding two yarns together takes half the amount of time as winding two separate balls of yarn.

disadvantages

• If you purchase your yarn already in balls, this technique takes extra time to get started.
• If you’re working on a small project that doesn’t need two balls worth of yarn, this technique requires modification. You can divide your yarn in half, and then wind these two smaller balls together…but that makes this technique more time-intensive.

So, there you go! Hopefully, one of these techniques will be right for you!

Best,
Stacey