Winding Yarn

My mother and I learned to knit together. She had a few months head start on me, but we pretty much fumbled around, learning stitches and trading tips with each other. I miss knitting with Mom. It was always a joy to discover new yarns together and to puzzle out new patterns. Now I'm teaching my daughter and granddaughter (as well as their friends) to knit. Mom, I'm carrying on the tradition.

When Mom and I learned to knit you had two choices for yarn: animal fiber (spell that "wool") and plant fiber (cotton.) Synthetic yarns hadn't been invented yet. The best feature of animal fiber yarn is it's springiness, it's memory. If stretched, it returns to it's shape when the tension is removed. Think of how a sweater stretches when it goes over your head, to see springiness in action. Remember a cotton sock that won't stay up, and you'll remember yarn that has lost its spring. One thing Mom learned early was that there is a trick to winding yarn. If you wind yarn too tightly, it loses its memory and loses its spring. That can be a disaster to a sweater or sock.

The trick to winding yarn, is to do it loosely. If you are winding by hand, always wind the yarn over two fingers. When the fingers are removed, the yarn has some room to return to it's original state. Putting a core at the center of your yarn ball can help you wind easier. If that center is a small balloon, you can pop the balloon later and create a center-pull ball. (See my ball-winder post early in my blog for full details.)

Commercial yarn winders are easier. They create little "cakes" of yarn that are wound on a spindle as you turn a crank. You keep a steady, but not tight, tension on the yarn as it goes onto the ball. When it comes off the spindle, the tail you anchored to the spindle becomes the center pull end.


You can use this sort of winder in combination with a Swift. The swift looks like a hat rack married to an umbrella. It holds a skein of yarn (the circle kind, not the center-pull kind) while you shape the yarn ball. This allows one person to wind yarn evenly when doing it the old-fashioned way requires two people -- one winding, and one holding they yarn.