Plying Balls

I had a question over the weekend about plying from center pull balls.  How risky it was to do that - would the yarn get all tangled up...?  I'd actually taken some pictures a few weeks ago that I'd forgotten about never shared that demonstrated my favorite way to ply like that.

If I'm spinning a lot of yarn for a big project (remember when I used to do that?!?), I wind each bobbin off into a center pull ball and then at the end of spinning all my singles, I try to pair up the fattest singles with the skinniest singles so that my plied yarn all matches as best it can.

The other time I use center pull balls to ply is if I have a small bobbin of something and I just want to ply it back on itself.  In this case I found a very old ball of some Petunia that had been languishing in my stash for no good reason.  

I found the end buried in the center of the ball and the end wrapping around the outside of the ball.

In my typical redneck style, I tied the two ends together.  Is there a "correct" way to do this?  

You can see how things could get really messy, really quickly, so I pulled out a trusting plying ball. This one is made of felted wool, but could be a cat toy, wadded up kleenex, whatever you have handy.  

And started winding the two strands side by side around the ball.

Nice and tidy.

And there's the center of the single strand.

If you are plying two or three (or more) singles together, you'd just take the end from the center of each ball and treat them the same way as above.  By using the center pull ball to get everything sorted ahead of time, you not only make sure your yarns are not going to get all tangled, but it also helps keep the tension side by side more even.

Thanks for the question!  It was nice to think about spinning for a change :-D.  Maybe this week I'll get to do more than just think about it!