Separating Embroidery Floss

So, yesterday I put up a post about crochetting a rock cozy. When I found that regular crochet thread was too bulky for my project, I decided to use a few strands of embroidery floss instead. The trick was… how to separate them from the twisted 6-strand length. I tried to look it up on the interwebs, but the techniques they offered were for short lengths of thread – only about 1 metre at most. Unfortunately, I had 8 metres I was wanting to separate (so that I would have enough to crochet a large motif), so the ideas I found wouldn’t work for me. Hmm. At first, I separated out 3-strands and started pulling them out, trying to untwist as I went – but I just ended up making a big, knotty mess. Time to put on my thinking cap…

Eventually, this is what I came up with.

Step 1: Open The Skein. Remove the wrappers and find the center of all the loops.

Step Two: Slip The Centre Around Something Heavy. Like a book, or piece of wood, or something similar.

Step Three: Separate Out Your Threads. Initially, I chose two sets of 3-strands, unwinding the thread clockwise to unravel it, then wrapping each set of strands in a tiny, little ball. But this was very time consuming. So…

Step Four: Attach Your Separated Threads To A Small But Wide Object. I took two sets of 3-strands and taped them to a little wooden block that my son had. You could use anything for this – a piece of cardboard, a toilet paper roll, another small book… Or, you could also separate out different sized sets of strands – three sets of two, six sets of one, etc.

Step Five: Rotate. Turn the block like a propeller to unwind the thread. For me, this was clockwise. When there is a good length of unraveled yarn, roll the block up like a roll of wrapping paper, taking care to keep your sets separate. Unwrap a bit more from around the book and repeat until done.

Step Six: Use Your Strands. You can work with it right off the block, or as I prefer, you can wind the string into separate tiny, little balls.

And voila – separated floss threads, in nice long lengths! I like to have all my thread ready to go before I even start my project, and since I only had one block that was that size, I ended up doing four bunches of floss ahead of time. Kinda pretty altogether, don’t you think?

Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? 😉 Happy crafting!