Your Questions Answered

I was asked a question about my last post and instead of explaining it just to the questioner (Hi, Dad!), I thought I'd answer it here for anyone else who may not have understood. I commented in my last post that I didn't want to make many skeins with my niddy noddy and swift because it was too hard on my arm. I guess that's completely incomprehensible to non-fiber obsessed people. So here is an explanation--with pictures, even. (And please excuse the pictures--they are the only ones I have of my niddy noddy and swift with yarn on them and I have no yarn to wind so I can't take new ones.)

I handpaint yarn in hanks which are basically big loops of yarn, tied in several places to prevent tangling. (The yarn I dye comes that way, but if it didn't, I would need to wind it into hanks first.) After the yarn is dyed and dried, I re-skein it to mix up the colors. First, I put the yarn on my swift.


It clamps to a table and opens up a bit like an umbrella--that way you can adjust it to the size of your hank of yarn. It spins, so that when you pull on the end of the yarn, it just keeps going. To wind the yarn up into a new hank, I use a niddy noddy.


(Mine is made out of PVC pipe.) You wind the yarn around the bars--in a way that would be easy to show you, but currently seems impossible to to explain--and then slide it off, twist it and you have a pretty little skein.


And that's it. I hope that made more sense to those of you who didn't understand my last post--if there are any of you other than my dad (who I could just have explained this to when I see him tomorrow).

That process is all well and good for one or two skeins, but after a couple, my arm is burning and I have to quit. Which is why I have ordered a skein winder which you just turn--leaving the niddy noddy completely out of the story. (I ended up ordering it from Paradise Fibers instead of the Woolery since the sale I thought they were having was actually last month and Paradise Fibers had a pattern that I wanted.)