All About Yarn Bobbins | Your How To Guide

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Anyone who knits or crochets using different colours should know about yarn bobbins. Yarn bobbins are a handy way to keep track of all your colour changes without having a big, tangled mess.

I personally use yarn bobbins when crocheting graphs – either using the bobble stitch combo or corner to corner (C2C) technique.  Yarn bobbins helped me keep all the colour changes organized. Prior to using yarn bobbins, my work was a huge mess. I spent more time untangling than actually crocheting!

For some C2C crochet basics, be sure to check out my blog post here.

I’ve crocheted a few C2C blankets – they’re lots of fun.

What are Yarn Bobbins?

Yarn bobbins are mini, or small skeins of yarn that you would use when working on something that has various colour changes. I’m not really talking about colour changes that are stripes – more like when making a graph, wherein creating a picture, you have not only several colour changes but they are all over the place as well.

What to Use as Yarn Bobbins

There are some fancy wooden spools that I have seen people use as bobbins. The easiest and cheapest hack for me was large clothespins. I was able to find packages of large clothespins at my local dollar store and they work great.

There are various sources for clothing pins – just find the largest that you can. The larger the clothespin, the more yarn you can wind on them.

Winding the Bobbins

I wind my yarn bobbins backwards. What that means, is that I hold the clamp part of the clothespins and wind the part that you would squeeze to open it up. The reason why I do this is that if you wind your yarn on the part that opens, you won’t be able to open it up. By holding that as I wind, I’m sure not to wind in that area.

Be careful of filling up your yarn bobbins too full. I found that with the clothespins, the yarn would fall off and become a tangled mess which in turn defeats the whole purpose. I know it may not seem like you can’t really load up on a lot of yarn (especially if it’s the main colour, like the background colour), but trust me – if it falls off, you’ll spend more time untangling it than actually working on your project.

Since the yarn bobbins don’t hold too much, you will need to replenish them as needed. Attaching the same colour is easy using the ultimate yarn join. To learn how to do the ultimate yarn join, check out my YouTube video here.

How Many Yarn Bobbins Will You Need?

The number of yarn bobbins that you need is dependent upon the number of colour changes that you will be doing. Keep in mind that this is not the same as the number of colours that you will be needing for a project because you may need.

In order to figure out the number of yarn bobbins that you will need, look at the line of the project that has the most colour changes.

How to Use the Bobbins

Quite often at the beginning of I project in which I know that I will be using yarn bobbins, I prepare the yarn bobbins in advance. This is not necessary – I just like to have things organized at the beginning so that when I start crocheting, I can do so without interruption.

Keep the bobbins clipped to your work until you are ready to use them. When you need that particular colour, just unclip and use.

I keep everything clipped until I am using it. When I take a break or put the project away, I make sure all the yarn bobbins are clipped to my project. When I come back to it, the yarn bobbins are all there and ready to go – no big tangled mess!

Since the yarn bobbins don’t hold too much, you will need to replenish as needed. Attaching the same colour is easy using the ultimate yarn join.

Prefer me to talk you through yarn bobbins? Check out my video where I go over each of these points.

Want to remember all about yarn bobbins? Be sure to save this to your favourite Pinterest board.