Products and Tools

How I Turned a Scarf into a Ball of Yarn

July 19, 2009 |

Author Eric

I know that’s backwards, but I couldn’t resist.

I got my ball winder from knitpics.com the other day and it’s pretty cool. Very affordable at just 19.99. I didn’t have any skeins I wanted to ball up yet so I turned its fury on a scarf I crocheted back in May before I decided to get into knitting. It was the bulky Wool-ease in a sort of oatmeal color. The scarf didn’t excite me, just done in alternating rows of dc done in the back loop. It had an interesting accordion like texture but seeing it was 105 degrees outside I was not too attached to it. I decided to canibalize it for a cossack hat and so threw it to the hungry ball winder.

The top of the winder has a sort of notch to hold the start of the yarn but it’s not cut right for a bulky yarn. Once I got it started it made short work of the scarf. I held it to the floor with a foot and just wound away. The ball winder is designed to put more distance between the turns of the yarn than I would have thought. As you can see in the picture it’s not closely wound. So the ball was bigger than perhaps necessary, and being bulky yarn it turned into a ball that was a little too large for the winder to finish.

It was crochet; it had to be destroyed.

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So now I have a very cool ball of yarn to turn “reinyarnate” into a hat. (Read about technique below…)

Proof of Reinyarnation

There is a bit of a technique to using a ball winder. One thing I find is that if I don’t control the incoming yarn it will flop about a lot and the ball will be kind of loose and larger when done. So what I do is take a small piece of fabric and hold it loosely around the strand of yarn so that it keeps a very mild tension on the line. This produces a somewhat smaller ball and deters the yarn from tangling in the wire yarn guide.

Another thing I do is put the source skein or ball in a shoebox or paper bag on the floor. Backing up a bit: I clamp my ball winder to the back of a chair and put the source yarn on the floor below it. So with the source in a bag or box it won’t travel all over the room.

ballwinderonchair520

And sometimes I will put the source on a vertical paper towel holder if I can get the rod through the ball/skein easily. This helps more with oblong skeins you buy at craft stores as when they are being unwound they can flop about a lot in the bag or box. Don’t expect them to actually turn on the towel holder, and at a certain point you will have to deal with the last bit of yarn flopping about oddly anyway.

ballwinderskeinonholder1

I find the ball winder very handy, and use it to rewind balls for projects that I’m restarting, or when I’m done with part of a ball, as the ball becomes squishy when you pull from the center and it’s nice to put it back in good order for storage or further use. And you can in many cases, of course, rewind and rip out at the same time, straight back to the ball.

Beware of Cat

July 19, 2009 |

Author Eric

If you have pet, beware of leaving your needles out where they can get to them. I’ve discovered that cats are crazy about bamboo needles. They are like cat nip to them. I might as well be knitting with mice tied to my needles for all the attention it gets.

I mentioned this to to someone who works at the Gail Knits store and she said yes, beware of mixing cats or dogs and non-metal needles. My cat Max is all over me when I have bamboo out. The first hint was when I was first learning to knit and I was digging through a bag of stuff and pulled out a Clover circular that had a small swatch of practice knitting on it and set it down on the carpet.

I left the room for about 2 minutes, sitting at my computer to look up something, when Max comes proudly marching in with his prey: dragging the swatch still on the bamboo circular, trailing the yarn all the way back from my bedroom, through the living room to the dining room where the ball of yarn lay abandoned. I just laughed my head off, and he was so happy with his prize. So I bound off and cut off the swatch for him and rescued the needles for myself.

Here he is mauling his prize:

Max and his prey

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Then the other day I was starting my sampler for the Sweater Workshop book on the same Clover #8×16″ and he was right there, as the picture below shows.

A not-very-subtle interest...

So have to be studious about hiding my non-metal needles and crochet hooks, and Options cables and Zephyr tips when I am away for a moment or more.

Portuguese Knitting DVD Arrives

July 10, 2009 |

Author Eric

Just got the Andrea Wong Portuguese Knitting DVD and it is great. Plays fine in my computer – someone said it wouldn’t play on any of her DVD players. I tried it on my Sanyo DVD player for my TV and it works fine.

This is great! As I was first attempting – literally – to get a grip in knitting I kept thinking I needed to be an octopus to knit. Controlling the yarn tension and moving the yarn around the needle in the continental or English style of knitting is insanity-making for me, and probably for many newcomers. But I bet that even seasoned knitters would love this just for watching a few seconds of the lessons in Portuguese knitting.

The stitches are fluid and simple, and the knitting pin controls both the trajectory and tension of the yarn just so beautifully. From knit to pearl you don’t have to move the yarn from back to front, but with a flick of your thumb you move it to be over or under the right needle depending on what stitch you are doing. In effect, this puts it behind or in front, but as the yarn is always coming from your pin or pendant its still easier than moving front to back or back to front as in other styles.

I’ve only watched a minute or two and felt the tension leaving my body. I feel so much better about learning to knitting. I admit, I’ve barely learned the knit and pearl stitches English style and have hated every minute of it. Now I’m free! You’ve got to learn this method!

Sunday I joined Netflix to get the knitting dvd they had and it arrived yesterday, but I may not even bother with it. It is called Knit Stitches in Motion. I guess I should see if there’s anything on it that is generally useful, or maybe patterns. I’ll let you know. (UPDATE: not worth your time, even for learning other styles.)

Again, I haven’t watched much yet, but I’ve heard that they also use hooked knitting needles sometimes as well. That would be handy as well, but it looks like if done right you wouldn’t need them. I may modify a pair of my bamboo units to see how that works. I fiddled with knitting with a couple of crochet hooks and it was a lot easier to control the yarn, but that was with English style. I didn’t need to fret about losing the yarn off the tips of the needles when pulling it through the stitch. In Portuguese knitting the angle of the needles and the yarn almost guarantee you won’t lose it. Yea!

I’m thinking of starting a movement to have continental and English styles banned and all the books burned. Memory and mention of them should be removed from all books and web sites, like how Rameses removed the name of Moses from all monuments in Egypt! Just kidding of course. But that’s how much I like the Portuguese style of knitting. It was so much easier to learn. Give it a try.

A Fist Full of Needles: The Good and The Bad

July 9, 2009 |

Author Eric

My order of bamboo circular knitting needles and straights and crochet hooks from Asia arrived while I was laying by the pool. I found a web site that offered them wholesale but when they arrived the other day the quality was not so good in that the points are too dull to knit with. The taper is correct but apparently the finishers didn’t have an example of how sharp they should be. So now I have over 45 sets of needles that I can’t use. Fortunately they were pretty darn cheap.

I thought of sharpening them and looked around for appropriate power tools. I found a grinder/buffer that would work but after experimenting with a good set of Takumi bamboo circs that I prefer metal. Being new to knitting I didn’t like aluminum needles at first because I could barely control the yarn. They were so slippery.

After trying metal and bamboo – and getting better AND learning Portuguese knitting (which solved the yarn control problem) – I’ve settled on a nice grown-up’s set of nickel plated Options interchangeable circs from knitpics.com. They had a very good review on handknitsbysusan.com, and after looking at a bunch of others on amazon I decided this was a good choice for the price and features. I could have got some cheap aluminum ones but the trial pair I got had a very stiff cable, worse than the Takumi bamboo pair, which wasn’t that bad.

The one’s from Asia had a very flexible hollow vinyl tubing for the cable that might have been nice but I couldn’t test it out because I literally couldn’t get the needle into the cast on stitches, it was that dull. There were a few sets that would probably be okay but not enough to justify declining a refund. I wrote to them requesting a refund but their first reply was that these dull points are what people are buying wholesale all over the world. I compared them to bamboo needles in a store but those were all as sharp as the usual metal needles. So I wrote back saying I still want a refund.

I got a reply saying that will refund it if I mail it back to them. I’ll have to see what the cost is for that. Oh well. I think for a hand-finished wooden item like this you take a chance. I will order a set of sixteen inch circulars I found on amazon.com that have a lot of good reviews.

Bamboo, Bamboo, Bamboo

June 30, 2009 |

Author Eric

I just ordered some needles from China – a couple 15 pc sets of circs in 2 lengths, a set of 15 bamboo needles and a set of ten crochet hooks. It was a great buy. I just hope the quality is good. If not, I could them myself. I can smooth, sand, refinish or reshape if I need to, but it may end up being a lot of labor I don’t need.

I plan to use that also in a test to see if I can give them crochet tips myself, as I want to experiment with hook knitting. I tried it with some crochet hooks a few days ago and it was quite easy to knit that way. It was mentioned that they use hooked knitting needles in Portugal and elsewhere, so this may come in handy.

Knit for Brains