Knitting aside – hand wind a pull skein

Hold a generous end of the yarn between two pencils and begin wrapping.

To the non-knitting audience: some yarn is sold pre-wound into a skein that dispenses from the center, corralling the unused portion into a tidy ball. Other yarn comes in hanks or coils and needs to be wound into a ball before use. We don’t want a simple ball because as the yarn unwraps while knitting, the ball tends to spinning away from the knitter (onto the sofa, floor, into the proverbial kitten’s mittens). For about $100, you can buy an apparatus to wind center-pull skeins, but I don’t knit enough to warrant the purchase. So I came up with this easy way to wind a pull-skein by hand. Which I present to the knitting blogosphere with gratitude for the generous sharing of experience found therein. Photographed in my cardboard studio box with the two flash set-up.

Wind yarn along the length of the pencils. Don’t worry about criss-crossing it yet.

Once the height of the ball-in-winding is established, start winding with an up-and-down motion to reinforce the structure of the ball.

The pencils make a convenient handle for rapid hand-winding so I leave them in place until the entire skein is wound.

Voila!

The yarn is Knit Picks‘ Wool of the Andes Bulky Hand Dye in redwood. I used it to knit the Blanket Coat in Sally Melville’s The Knitting Experience: Color and it came out great.

To the knitting audience: This isn’t a “knitting blog” because I am a slow knitter. I knit to meditate, cogitate and ponder, to keep my hands busy and mouth firmly shut in meetings, to relax. Photography is my passion and my occupation – I hope you like my work and come back to my blog for some of my non-knitting posts.