Permies Poll: Cake vs Skein vs Hank vs Ball - Which is your favorite form of yarn?

My wife prefers 'caked' yarn for her projects so naturally I prefer yarn cakes as well!

We make liberal use of natural wool yarns and she is working on a queen sized crochet blanket for our bed. We got a lot of yarn in that was in hanks.

We have a ball winder and a yarn swift. Somehow I lost one of the swift's pegs so we rigged some disposable chopsticks to fit the hole and it worked just fine. It took a few hours this weekend but it was a satisfying job.

Definitely a (center-pull) cake, is my first choice. Second is a (center-pull) ball. This was driven home again, just yesterday, when I spent hours untangling the yarn barf from a giant skein of yarn that was pilling as I was attempting to untangle it... Had I simply wound it on my center-pull cake winder, to start with, it would have taken minutes, but nnnooooooooo... ~shakes my head🙄😬~

I like ball, and generally rewind everything to be a ball.
I also (gasp) LOVE TANGLED YARN. I have seriously thought about being that person you can send yarn to for untangling.

I'm a mad spinner, so hanks are my choice.  The yarn stays in hanks until I want to use it (could be for knitting or weaving, or dyeing before using for either) then I go for the centre-pull ball.   A simple swift and a ball winder come into play, and the balls don't necessarily get wound all at the same time.  Not a simple question to answer!    

The one labeled as hank in the picture is the one I favour as it's kinder on the yarn for long term storage and is cheaper to ship as it can squish flat.  

It's an interesting stage in textile language.  Maybe 20 years ago, the "hank" used to be called a skein and a hank was a very specific length of yarn (depending on the kind of fibre, and country).  Both had the same shape.  I think it's fun how textile language changes over time, but also confusing when reading books more than a few years old.  I wish more books had glossaries.  

Yeah, the vocabulary is interesting.

I think cake and ball are fundamentally the same thing. Cakes come off the winder and are prettier (particularly for yarns with a medium-length color change). Balls come of the nostepinne. Both have a center-pull end and a wrap-end. I don't much prefer one over the other. I guess I slightly prefer to knit off a cake because it rolls around less, but I like winding on a nostepinne pretty often because I don't have to get the winder and swift out.

I call the thing that that image labels as a "hank" a skein and if you unhook the ends and let the twist fall out then you have a hank.

I spin into hanks where it's probably wetted and fulled and dried, and then twisted into a skein for storage. Putting it in a ball or cake adds tension which will stress the yarn over time, so I only do that when preparing for a project.

I don't have a word for the thing that picture calls a skein, but I've purchased yarn in that form.

Last vote in apple poll was on January 14, 2025

Tereza Okava wrote:I also (gasp) LOVE TANGLED YARN. I have seriously thought about being that person you can send yarn to for untangling.

Hehehehe - this is bringing back ancient memories of being a young child. My parents would go out to the local woollen mills taking used fchicken-feed sacks with them and pay a few pence to fill them up with the sweepings from around the looms. They would come home and tip out a great tangled mess of brightly coloured bits of woollen yarn and we'd all sit around it and tease out individual strands and wind them up into mini balls. When we'd done it all, the next job would be to sort the balls into different bags of different lengths, using the edge of the dining table as a measuring stick. The bags would be labelled one to around seven if my memory serves me right. Then mum would crochet granny squares using a teeny ball from bag one for the middle bit, and so on using a ball from each bag till the square was complete. Sometimes we'd help 'design' squares by choosing a colour from each bag and sliding them in turn, biggest first, onto a knitting needle.

Oh, and I use the old definition of hanks and skeins too.  

I was talking with the professor who was excited about this new research.  Apparently, it was trying to prove that people who grew up with headphones, especially ear buds, had increased untangling abilities over previous generations.

I asked how many knitters were in the study.  They said zero.  I said, ah... ... ... um...

They said, ... ... ...

My understanding it that paper that was about to get published got pulled so they could reexamine the selection process.  Because if a lay person like me could come up with a conflict in their method within two seconds, it's not going to hold up to peer review.

And since the goal was to prove that ear buds produced this awesome new skill never seen in humans before, the funding for that study got pulled.  

r ranson wrote:  Apparently, it was trying to prove that people who grew up with headphones, especially ear buds, had increased untangling abilities over previous generations.

Ha, headphones, a couple feet of stiffish cord. No match for people who grew up with cassette tapes.