Yarn is Not Potatoes

So, you know how I always question things? And wonder if there’s not an easier way to do things?

Sometimes those experiments go wrong. This was one of those times.

I had some skeins to wind for a project, and was thinking about the process involved: untwist hank, put on swift, snip off ties, find ends, decide which end will wind off smoothly, feed into winder, wind, shove label into center of ball as it comes off winder, repeat. I wondered, wouldn’t it be easier to load all the hanks of yarn onto the swift at once, then just wind them one after the other? Because in cooking, this totally works and seems to make the process go faster. If I have six potatoes to dice, I wash them all, then peel them all, then dice them all. I don’t take one potato through the whole process separately before starting with the next potato.

So I untwisted a skein, loaded it onto the swift, and followed that with two more. The swift, she was full. The swift — it turned out — she was heavy.

I hadn’t anticipated that the weight of extra skeins would affect the amount of force required to turn the swift, but it did. That meant the yarn coming off the swift became significantly stretched going onto the ball winder. That’s not a good thing. Wool will eventually want to return to its normal state, and that means anything I knit with this yarn will change and likely shrink once it hits the water.

Here’s how significant the difference was between the skein wound by itself and the one that had the weight of extra yarn on the swift.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for yarn that’s been wound too tightly, and that’s to re-wind the yarn. I like to pop the yarn cake into a mixing bowl to keep it from running off as it jumps around.

Here are the two balls after the second was re-wound. All fixed!

The experiment was not a total failure, however. It did serve to illustrate how important a freely-spinning swift is to getting a dependable cake of yarn.

I’m going to go lubricate my swift now.