The Long Winding

Woah, posting TWO days in a row! Ha, I bet you can't keep this up, Pia :D

Anyway, this is a knitting post, so any non-knitters, prepare to yawn or stop reading.

A while back, I bought some loooovely but extremely thin yarn on a cone. The fact that yardage said 6500 yards/150 g might have been a clue to the thinness, but no, didn't register. I soon figured out that to finish a project with just one thread would require a decade or two, so I needed thickness. I found a good project and decided that four strands would be enough, but I don't have a ball winder, so off I went winding off a small ball with enough of one strand to complete the project twice. Then I cut the yarn, and wound a new 2-strand ball with the strand from the ball and a strand from the cone, until I had used app. half of my 1-strand ball, now leaving me with the 4 strands I needed: 1 from the 1-strand ball, 2 from the 2-strand ball, and 1 from the cone. My hands and shoulders were not happy, from all this winding, but now it was done.

But, project completed, I still had more than half the cone left. Winding 3000+ yards by hand again? No thanks! So, my friend Julie has a ball winder - yay! - this winds yarn into pretty cakes. The big advantage of the cake as opposed to the ball and the cone is that you have access to both ends of the yarn, so my plan was to wind first all the yarn into a cake, and then use that cake to wind a 2-strand cake, and then use that to wind a 4-strand cake. But, this yarn is so slippery and fine, it ended up trying to escape the ball winder, which was the cause of much laughter, and when I tried winding the 2nd cake it quickly emerged that the first cake would tangle hopelessly. So, I would a 2-strander by hand instead, and I've just this minute completed winding that one into 4 strands (which involved winding half the 2-strander into a ball first). How do I know when I've reached half, you say? Well, I weighed the initial ball on my crappy kitchen scale, so that I'd know roughly how much to wind off. I ended up being wrong by less than 50 yards, which is okay - the scales are REALLY crappy.

So, now I have this looooovely ball of 4 strands, ready for another project, but next time I buy thin yarn, I will also pay extra to have them wind it into a thicker yarn - I am never doing this again!