How To: Crochet without loosing your ball of wool

Here's a cool tip my Mom taught me years ago, to contain and keep clean large skeins of yarn....Take an empty clean 2 liter soda bottle. Using a sharp knife to get it started, make a small slit a little more than halfway down the bottle, and using scissors, cut it as straight as possible all around the bottle, thus turning it into two pieces. Now, put your skein of yarn into the bottle, take the working end and thread it up thru the neck of the bottle. Fit the upper half into the lower half. Now. your yarn will stay clean, and won't run away on you and the thread will pull out neatly thru the neck. And it is re-usable for as many times as you need. I'm sure that this trick would also work well for small skeins of yarn, just use a smaller bottle.