There was a time when I didn’t know how to properly use my ball winder and I wound all my cakes of yarn into extremely tight messes. This is bad in general because the cakes get tangled inside and are then horribly annoying to knit with, but it’s especially bad for wool yarn because wool has a memory. This means that if it’s sitting with a lot of tension on it for a long period of time it will get stretched out, but after whatever you knit with it is washed, it will spring back to its former shape and your garment will suddenly be smaller. No good! (Part of the point of having a ball winder is to avoid this issue, since hand-wound balls can be pretty tense.) These days I have improved a great deal at winding yarn, but I still have some that I wound back in my unenlightened days. Tonight I used my swift to unwind this yarn (Malabrigo Sock in Solis) back into a hank, which is now soaking and will be hung up to dry, then re-wound into a proper cake. I thought it looked beautiful sitting in the sink.

There was a time when I didn’t know how to properly use my ball winder and I wound all my cakes of yarn into extremely tight messes. This is bad in general because the cakes get tangled inside and are then horribly annoying to knit with, but it’s especially bad for wool yarn because wool has a memory. This means that if it’s sitting with a lot of tension on it for a long period of time it will get stretched out, but after whatever you knit with it is washed, it will spring back to its former shape and your garment will suddenly be smaller. No good! (Part of the point of having a ball winder is to avoid this issue, since hand-wound balls can be pretty tense.)

These days I have improved a great deal at winding yarn, but I still have some that I wound back in my unenlightened days. Tonight I used my swift to unwind this yarn (Malabrigo Sock in Solis) back into a hank, which is now soaking and will be hung up to dry, then re-wound into a proper cake. I thought it looked beautiful sitting in the sink.