Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Making cake... with yarn

Caking yarn is a very satisfying task to have completed.  Especially if you let your skeins of wool pile up to a daunting degree.


In fact at this point, when you can fill a generously-sized tray with all the yarn you want to knit in the next few months, it's pretty temping to wind just a cake at a time, as you need them.

Very, very tempting.  And if I wasn't going to have to move house soon I would have put off the job entirely, but not only am I moving house, I don't seem to be able to secure any magical elves to do all the packing for me and shrink all my not-immediately-needed possessions into something the size of a sugar cube.  So I felt it behooved me to take action.

Here's the thing about yarn cakes:  they take up less space than yarn skeins.


Or at least, they seem to.


The conversion process is not always fun and sometimes you run into an actual snag, a big hunk of tangled string on the swift that you have to stop and sort out by hand.


I do not enjoy this task.  I especially do not enjoy losing about two hours to it on a job that was already going to take a very long time.  But with perseverance, I was able to get a whole crowded tray of skeins into a neat and tidy tray of cakes, in just about five hours.


And then I re-caked all the sock yarn into pairs, so I can just grab and go all through the fall. 


Like Helena says, it's very very important always to have emergency knitting available, and that's the primary purpose of my stripey sock yarns.  (that, and warm brightly striped toes every spring and fall.)


Anybody want to bet me I can't knit up all these pre-socks before Christmas?  (no seriously, don't, because I will lose so badly.)


Even if I don't knit them all as soon as I'd like to though: so pretty.

In other news: I did something a little crazy last weekend and if you drop in again tomorrow, I'll tell you about it.  See you then!

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