Fast sock knitting with crochet hooks.

Hook Knitting Detail Video

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.

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.

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.