I was knitting a Fair Isle sweater that used thirteen hanks of yarn when I learned the benefits of winding your yarn in a center pull style:
I can wind the yarn in either the egg shape or the cake shape with a flat top and bottom. You can drape the hank across your knees and wind the yarn while visiting or watching TV. Since it is quieter than a table top yarn winder and portable, I find myself winding yarn this way more often than with the table top yarn winder. But since the table top one is a beautiful wooden one, I can’t bring myself to sell it. The photos show an example of each shape. I also learned that winding the yarn is a good task during a car trip. Below are some videos on winding yarn by hand:

How to use a nostepinne:
https://youtu.be/oGaA92IjXDg

How to use your thumb to wind center-pull yarn ball:
https://youtu.be/z2HxJBXVoww

My son, who uses a wood lathe to turn pens, made me a nostepinne to help me hand wind the yarn. He made the handle square and textured that helped you hold it between your thumb and fingertips as you turn it and the yarn end cylindrical with a hard glossy finish to help yarn balls even with delicate fibers slide off w minimal friction. This hard slick durable finish was accomplished w an 18 step finishing process. I love the different wood species available and size. The size is good to tuck into my project bag or in a drawer. In spite of the 6” length, it will accommodate a full skein yarn, from 440 yards of fingering or a double 200grams 365 yards of Aran weight. The Aran wool was 3-ply and lovely for cables.
https://www.ravelry.com/projects/heyKerrianne/aran-sweate...

I often wind yarn during car trips.

About the other photos:

The two metals you see in the pizza cutter are pewter & steel.

Coffee scoop has real coffee beans embedded in the acrylic. You could smell the coffee as he was lathing it!

In one of the photos is Scot standing next to his mentor and sponsor in the Master WoodTurners’ Guild.

The cigar pens are customized using actual labels from a customer’s favorite cigars.

Another photo shows Scot working at his lathe. He located a workbench, lathe, and hand tools from a Woodturner who lived out of state and paid for it with his own money.

Last summer he worked as a lifeguard and saved his money to buy a 14’ Rhodes Bantam wooden racing sailboat built in 1958 in mahogany wood. He named her Peggy Sue. I thought it telling that he saved his money for a wooden boat instead of a car.
The boat was designed by Philip Rhodes who designed the boat that won America’s Cup in 1962. Rhodes helped design hulls during WW1 while still a student at MIT and also brought on board to help w marine architecture in WW2. Scot is proud of the history and has the original paperwork to his boat with Rhodes’s signature.

Yarn Twists when Winding
Knitting yarn off cake in counterclockwise adds more s twist to s-twist yarns, so turn cake so you’re always taking yarn off clockwise. Z-twist yarns are singly ply yarns and many Italian yarns.
https://youtu.be/-lgXdWfa5-M

Tension makes first wound cake tight, so rewind onto ball winder using the center pull strand and the outside strand unwinds in same direction in both the first and second cake.

Add s-twist when wrapping yarn counterclockwise,
So LTCO tail travels cck around thumb and loses twist as you cast on whereas you can see the upper index yarn gains twists. Yarn manufacturers take account that knitters will add s-twist as they knit.
https://youtu.be/DZBPxcjmxKc?si=65YWmXcvZ4pr0QSR

Knitting styles affect on twist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu49B-CMHqk
https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/community/picking-and...

Twisted Yarn creates bias in seamless knits
https://techknitting.blogspot.com/2011/01/avoiding-yarn-t...

Picking and Flicking affect on fabric
https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/community/picking-and...

Yarn twist input from hand spinner
https://youtu.be/sWWQtYIQnRY?si=YholqNb-0Le3xv9q

Yarn ply twist:

Have you ever looked at stitches you’ve just cast on to find that you don’t have neat, distinct strands and it’s even difficult to count them without physically separating the fibers?

Cast on stitches spreading and merging together
Is it a problem with the yarn? No. As you can see in the next picture, a further 10 stitches have been cast on, but this time they are all clearly distinguishable. So what’s going on?

10 more stitches added which do not spread.
The answer lies in the twist.

Diagram of an S twist and a Z twist yarn
Twisting fiber imparts strength to a yarn. It makes the fibers harder to pull apart lengthways and the yarn therefore harder to break. You can twist in either direction. If you hold a length of fiber one end and twist the far end to the left you get an S twist in your yarn. If you twist to the right instead you get a Z twist.

Most manufactured single plies are spun with a Z twist. To ply these Z-spun singles together they are spun with an S twist to give a balanced plied yarn. Almost all yarns available to us as knitters and crocheters are made in this way, i.e. Z twist if they’re single ply and having a final S twist if they’re plied.

Knitting or crocheting with a yarn changes the amount of twist. How it changes depends on the final twist direction of the yarn and the direction in which you wrap the yarn around the needle.

Does that matter? Adding more twist to your yarn causes it to tighten up, making it slightly stronger and less susceptible to pilling, and also making the stitches easier to work and less likely to split. Reducing the twist in a yarn makes the fibers and plies separate and it is more difficult to work without splitting the yarn.

This table shows how different techniques affect S-plied and Z-plied yarns:

S-plied Z-plied
Knitting ‘Western’ method Adds twist Removes twist
Knitting ‘Eastern’ method Removes twist Adds twist
Knitting ‘Combined’ method
Knit ― Adds twist
Purl ― Removes twist
Knit ― Removes twist
Purl ― Adds twist
Crocheting Removes twist Adds twist
A note on different knitting methods: Most knitters in America / UK / Western Europe / Australia are ‘Western’ knitters - the right hand leg of the stitch sits at the front of the work, i.e. closest to you on the needle. Whether you hold the yarn in your right hand (English or throwing style) or your left hand (Continental or picking style) you are still using the ‘Western’ method. ‘Eastern’ knitters have the right hand leg of their stitches on the far side of the needle, work into the back of all their stitches, and take the yarn round the needle in the opposite direction to form a new stitch. The ‘Combined’ method uses a mix of the two.

Western and Eastern knitting methods and their effect on yarn twist
So the good news for most ‘Western’ knitters is that they introduce more twist into the commonly available S-plied yarns. In this picture, showing a swatch I made using an S-plied yarn, the stitches on the needle have plenty of twist where they were made with the Western knitting method, but the plies have separated where the Eastern method was used.

For crochet, the opposite is true - in the pictures below, the plies of the S-plied yarn have separated, while the stitches of the single with its Z twist are tightly spun.

Crochet using a Z-twist single ply
Twist is added to this Z-spun single when crocheting

Crochet using an S-plied yarn
The plies of an S-plied yarn untwist when crocheted

What does that mean for your knitting and crochet? The twist in your yarn can make the difference between sailing along row after row, hardly looking at your work, or finding that you split your stitches if you don’t pay close attention. Of course that doesn’t mean that a knitter has to learn the Eastern knitting method in order to enjoy a single ply yarn, and crocheters are very used to working with S-plied yarns. After a few rows your fingers become used to your yarn and the level of care that you need to take to form stitches with it. Plus any stray loops in your knitting can often be fixed by dropping a stitch down to that point and collecting them in.

But it is easier to work with yarn when you are adding twist as you work. Many crochet cotton threads are Z-plied for this reason and there are a few Z-plied yarns available for crochet and also for twined knitting, a technique which leads to excess twist in an S-plied yarn.

Creped yarns
Yarns with a ‘cabled’ or ‘crepe’ construction also usually have a final Z-twist. In these yarns, singles are Z-twisted, then plied together with an S-twist, then those 2 ply yarns are plied together again with a final Z twist. Cable yarns are said to be very hard-wearing and less susceptible to pilling, though all that plying means they won’t feel as soft as a yarn with a lower total twist.

Finding Z-plied yarns
You can search on YarnSub for any of these Z-plied yarns.

Even if you can’t get hold of a Z-plied yarn, at least avoid using a loosely S-plied yarn for crochet, since you’ll be taking even more twist out as you work with it.

And if you don’t like the lack of twist (as in the picture at the top) that results from using a Z-spun single ply yarn for a cable cast on, try working it the ‘wrong’ way: wrap the yarn for the new stitch over, down and round the needle (rather than under, up and round), and slip the new stitch off the right hand needle by moving the left hand needle through the new loop towards you, not away from you. Both of these actions add twist to a Z-spun yarn instead of removing it and make little difference to the look of the cast on edge.

https://yarnsub.com/articlestwist.txt

https://yarnsub.com/articlestwist.txt

2-ply vs 3-ply in fabric
https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/community/yarn-detect...

To maintain s-twist when winding cake, wind so yarn wraps onto core clockwise; later the outside strand will come off counterclockwise to add s-twist.
https://youtu.be/oP6EM8CBpoU