Fans of knitting small Amigurumi toys often have a necessity to divide a thick yarn into thinner threads.
I want to share my method with you.
One doesn't always have an assistant who helps to wind a second ball or constantly pin it or unwind the thread — a task for the patient ones!
So, if you have a ball of thick yarn of the right colour, but it is too thick, you can always rewind it, dividing the thread into two or three parts (of course, when the yarn is multistrand and not fluffy).
I needed beige yarn for 1 hook. I had only a hank from YarnArt jeans (55% cotton, 45% acrylic; 50 gr / 160 m), but its thickness was two times thicker than I needed for knitting my Baba Yaga:
To unwind a ball, you need:
1. The yarn you want to unwind, mine was Jeans (please note that it is twisted of four thin threads)
2. Roll from plastic wrap or foil
3. Stationery elastic band
4. Plastic bag
Steps:
1. Put the ball of yarn in the bag.
2. Leave the thread sticking out of it.
3. Tie the top of the bag with the elastic band. Please note, you should tighten the bag with the band pretty tightly so that the thread was pulled from it with a little effort.
4. Split the end the yarn into the desired number of threads — 2-3 (I got 2) and wind them on the roll at a sufficient distance from each other.
5. Proceed to unwinding the ball, hanging the bag with yarn so that it could freely spin (this will go on its own). This is best done when standing or sitting on a high chair. Hold the threads with the thumbs inside, twist the roll away from you, winding the threads into separate hanks.
During this process, the thread in the bag may get entangled, there's nothing wrong with that, you just need to make a small hole in the top of the bag, remove the ball and the knot and put the ball back. The hole in the bag will not interfere with unwinding.
The process is time-consuming, but this method helps to cope with all alone and not pin the ball all the time to untwist the thread as it is normally done.
After the ball is unwinded, you just need to wind the yarn from the roll.
I hope my experience would be useful to you!
Good luck!