Don’t you just hate it when your balls get hairy?

No really, like when your carefully-wound cake of yarn just starts unwinding itself from the outside while you’re neatly using the center pull to work on a project? Especially when you’re using more than one color? Well, you’re in the right place – this is your quick (and cute) fix for hairy balls!

Back in 2010, when I was really getting into Ravelry, I went in search of the perfect device to keep my yarn neat. Being a maker, I didn’t want to shell out cash for a plastic thing. I’d seen several patterns for “ball bags”, “ball holders”, “ball bras”, etc. over the years, but I could never find one I liked. I wanted to show off the gorgeous yarn in its cake while I was working with it, and I needed something with a fair amount of stretch to it to accommodate differently sized balls. So, like any good yarnie, I went off and made my own. I sold them as finished objects for years, and finally wrote up the pattern in 2016. Which was edited for me by my crochet guru friend, Rachy Newin (of Rachy Newin Designs) and then left to sit in Google Drive purgatory for two more years.

Time passed and in 2018 the glorious UK dyer, Countess Ablaze, was asked by a local business owner to donate £800 worth of yarn AND teaching time for a faux charity event. In return she would get “exposure”. Her response was amazing and inspiring and the start of the Tits Out Collective. As a yarn company we released our TOC colorway, “If I Want Exposure, I’ll Get My Tits Out (Rock Your Tits Off)” but I really wanted to do more. It seemed the time for my little pattern had come! And so I brushed the dust off the document file, finally finished this little gem of a pattern, dubbed it “Expose Your Balls”, and released it.

All of the proceeds from this pattern will go to PPFA to help women continue to receive critical free reproductive health care in a stigma-free environment.

So get on it – expose your balls for a good cause!