This came up as an aside in last week’s great discussion, and I’m hoping to hear from a bunch of you. To wit: Do you wind your own yarn, and how? This here is the Imperial Yarn Anna I added to the shop last week, and I love this particular hunk of yarn so much I keep making jokes about wanting to have my yarn cake and knit it too. (It’s ok if you laugh at me instead of with me.) When I first took up knitting, I would always have the yarn store wind my purchases, but then I learned it’s not good for the yarn to be stored that way. So I stopped. But eventually I wanted to knit with something that wasn’t wound and had to figure it out. I knew how to wind a center-pull ball when I was a kid, so one look at a video* was all the refresher I needed. These days, I drape the skein over the backs of two chairs, stick out my left thumb, and I’m off.
I know I’d save a lot of time (precious knitting time) if I invested in a swift and ball winder — or at least the swift — but this has become one of my favorite things to do. I like my idiosyncratic hand-wound cakes much better than the perfect ones that came off the winder. But then I also applaud myself for how nearly perfect I can get them, like this one. For me, it’s all part of the fun.
But how ’bout you — what’s your method?
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*I can’t actually find one at the moment that’s as simple and tidy as how I do it. This linked one is basically it, except I don’t do any of that first part — I just wind the whole thing right on my thumb. No muss, no fuss.
