Saturday, January 31, 2009

A Yarn with Good Self Esteem

I've been conducting ball-winding experiments lately - homespun alternatives to the official ball-winder I don't have room for even if I thought I'd use it enough. I'd always been perfectly happy as a back-of-the-chair person who knits in smaller quantities until Karen wrote of her new ball-winder and more importantly, posted pictures of the results. Then I began to see the light. I do that whenever Karen does anything.

At the same time I've been reading about the many advantages of knitting from both the outside and inside of the ball, as when casting on to circular needles to avoid a jog. I tried that with yarn that came from the manufacturer in ball form rather thank a skein and it tangled horribly, so I decided to wind a skein specifically for simultaneous use of both ends.

As it happened I was about to cast on for something in the yarn at left, so I did my experiment and got to work. What I discovered: baby alpaca loves itself. It thinks - and rightly so in my opinion - that it is a wonderful, beautiful thing one should be as close to as possible. And that means stretching out its little fibre arms to every other strand in near range and holding on tight.

Last night I spent two hours poring over some serious clump-unraveling and then rewound the yarn in the old tried-and-true way, thinking that maybe a slippery yarn is better for my next adventure in knitting from the inside and out.

Which probably means a new slippery-yarn hat design is on the horizon, heh heh heh. And perhaps an official ball-winder, too.

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