Friday, September 4, 2009

Dividing a skein of yarn

I have to say that I always (usually) have a sock on my knitting needles and having finished my latest pair of socks over a week ago (eight days to be exact) I am feeling out of sorts. I just could not decide which sock yarn to knit with. I have two different skeins that were calling to me and I have a rule that I only knit one pair of socks at a time. Well, the Sheepfeet (color Royalty) won the toss and I plan on taking a quite moment this evening to cast on a new pair of socks.
I decided to divide my yarn onto two equal size balls ahead of time since, as usual, I am making toe up socks. Since I don't have one of those fancy gadgets to measure how many yards of yarn you have wound, I have to use my kitchen scale.
Here is how I did it:
I gathered up my supplies:
Swift
Ball winder
Skein of yarn
Kitchen scale

I weighed my skein of yarn before started, because even though the skein says that is weighs 100g this one actually weighed 94g. Since it weighs 94g that means that I want to make two balls of 47g each.


Wind the skein as usual. After winding my skein I checked the weight again to be on the safe side. It was still 94g.

Now comes the dividing. Remove the ball from your winder and start winding from the ball you just wound. When you think you are getting close to half-way check the weight of the ball you are winding from. You will likely need to wind a bit, check, wind, check, until you get it just right. Now you just snip the yarn, remove the ball from the winder and re-wind the rest of the yarn into a second ball.
Here is my technique for holding the ball as you are winding from it and also making sure that the yarn comes out smoothly.
Here they are. Now I can knit up my new socks with confidence that they will both be the same size!

1 comment:

amy @ Life in Pink Hi-Tops said...

Those are some really cool gadgets! Love the winding thingy--have never seen one before.
And I love the little squares from the previous post.