Nary a Ball to be Wound
I tend to go in fits and spurts with things. When it’s time to start a new project, I want to start ALL the new projects. It was like that a couple of weeks ago, when I finished up my Nightshift shawl.
I decided I needed another shawl-type project; something big with lots of easy knitting to do while sitting on Zoom calls or in front of the tv, because my sweater was at a point that needed thinking about, and so were the socks (and the other socks, and the cabled hat, and the lace capelet, but we shall not discuss the lower-level WIPs at this juncture).
After much deliberation and perusal of my Ravelry queue and recently-acquired yarn*, I narrowed it down to four or five likely projects. For each of these, I bought and printed out the patterns, found a suitable tote bag (cute tote bags are one of the top ten things I love about knitting), and began winding the yarn.
I know someone here is going to remind me of the perils of winding yarn too long in advance before starting a project. It’s true — there’s a goodly risk that the yarn, being slightly stretched while winding, will shrink back somewhat once it’s blocked. I try to wind gently, l squish my finished cakes to loosen them up some, but in the end, I choose to wind multiple projects at once because I’m not often in the mood for winding, and once the equipment is out, I just want to get it all done. (Plus, these were going to be shawls, so fit is not as much of an issue.)
The winding was not without its challenges. There’s an indie dyer out there — whose name I choose not to publicly take in vain — who has a habit of tying hanks in only two places … and in every one of my hanks from this dyer, one of those places was wrong. What I’m trying to descibe is this: If you take a hank and tie it in one place but miss a few strands, then grab those strands from one side of the hank and move them to the other side, then tie it with the yarn like that, you’d wind up with what I had. Not one hank, not two hanks, but every single hank from that dyer was tied that way. You can imagine what happened when I started winding them off my swift.
There was tangling. There were curses. There was a gnashing of teeth. There was a great deal of winding by hand.
But as I was setting up for a number of new projects, and all of them took multiple skeins of yarn, there was also plenty of winding in the expected way, right onto my trusty, inexpensive-but-dependable ball winder.
Eventually I finished cranking the final cake. I picked up the tag to tuck inside the middle of the cake (as I always do while I slide it off the winder), and as I turned, my elbow hit the winder and knocked it off the table. Over the course of winding many cakes, the winder had loosened its clamp almost completely. It went sailing to the floor and I heard an ominous crack.
At first I convinced myself that this could be glued back together. Then I spent some time thinking about what a tiny, sharp crack right up next to the cake of yarn would do to mohair at high speed. (Shudder)
Eventually I came to the inevitable conclusion that I would have to bite the bullet and buy a new ball winder. The old, unbranded, randomly Chinese-made ballwinder had served me for fifteen honorable years. It was time to see what the next generation of ball winders has in store for me.
The reviews I read seemed to point in two directions: heavy-duty shop-quality wooden ball winders in the multiple-hundred-dollar range, or the Royal. I prefer something smaller, more lightweight, and a easier on the pocketbook, so the Royal it was.
Except they don’t make the Royal any more.
A bit more research later, I found a copycat of the Royal that gets very good reviews here at the Oregon Woodworker. I ordered it and it came quickly, arriving nicely packaged and ready to take on some yarn.
Great! Let’s wind some yarn! Except… um, I kind of already wound all the yarn.
Wait, what’s that package in the corner of the porch? Oh, it’s the Nua Sport that I ordered from MDK for my Trellis Top. Yay! I can put the new winder through its paces!**
Anyone notice a little problem with that? Yeah. Pre-wound yarn.
I have never, never-ever-ever, been sad before about not needing to wind my yarn.
*Stephanie Pearl McPhee calls this the Canopy of the Stash, and I don’t think a better term has been invented. It is, indeed, the stuff on top.
** I did eventually get to put the winder through its paces, and it’s a winner. Easier and smoother to crank than my old one (which I used to think was easy to use until I compared it to this). All the workings are smooth and the cakes it makes are lovely. Highly recommend.
