Knitting Help - Winding Yarn Twice

[Music] [Applause] recently i posted a photo to facebook and instagram and we can go ahead and put that photo up right now and the caption on that photo said a visual of why i wind hanks of yarn twice once from the hank on the swift and a second time from the resulting cake the cake of yarn on the left is ideal relaxed and not stretched the cake on the right is tight practically a baseball and the yarn is stretched if yarn spends a significant amount of time stretched like this it can change your gauge or stitches per inch there is even a chance that the yarn will go back to the relaxed state after knitting and washing which will change the size of your finished knit okay so that was the post that was what i posted and instead of being like oh that's smart thank you for sharing stacy it just caused a ton of confusion and i would never knowingly post something that would cause so much confusion so i'm going to clear it all up right now like if you understood what i posted then then great there were people who did understand it just fine no problem but for a lot of people winding yarn and hanks and there's a lot of mystery around the different types of yarn and what we wind and i'm going to explain it all right now and i harvested the questions that came from facebook and instagram so i can read those first let's do an overview um i took that picture because i had just wound yarn for a project actually this project right here on the mannequin i'd wound that yarn and i noticed that the yarn that i had wound twice that was ready to go was nice and it really showed visually how tight the yarn that was wound once was so when you're knitting when you're knitting from a hank of yarn and this is a hink of yarn it is essentially a big loop of yarn right we can put it on a swift like this and we have a ball winder and all my tools i will list out and link to in the video description field and the yarn comes from i'm sorry about that noise there's someone with a diesel truck across the street there's nothing i can do about it um you pull the yarn from the the swift you get it on the ball winder you wind it up i will also give you links to my video on exactly how to do this carefully you know at home or at the yarn shop and then what you get is a cake of yarn this is a cake and it is some i always pull from the center of the cake and this is actually attached to my current project now so that is how you wind a kink if you a kink a cake of yarn what i do is after i pull the finished cake off of the ball winder i find the yarn and i put it back on the ball winder and wind it a second time and that's how i got that beautiful loose cake of yarn right okay and the reason i do that is so that the yarn is not horribly stretched in the in the cake right it's loose and your your knitting your gauge will end up um there's no chance of it being stretched and then the finished knit ending up a different size when the yarn possibly goes back to its relaxed state okay so i can start looking at some of these questions um and answering them because i have them all right here first one does hand winding need to be done twice and if you're buying yarn in a hank you don't need this whole setup you can use the back of a chair or a willing person to hold their hands up like this while you wind with your hands and likely no you're not going to need to wind it twice if you're winding by hand because you can you can control the tension really easily when you're winding by hand okay do you use a hand ball winder or an electric ball winder does it make a difference and i actually don't know the answer to that question because i've never used an electric ball winder i always get my upper body workout with a hand ball winder okay do you wind skeins twice this question came up so many times if you're buying your yarn in something that looks like this you do not need to wind it at all it is ready to go you um here's the trick that i always get asked which end do you look for the yarn because you can wind from the outside or you can pull the end from the inside of the skein if the label is printed like this one from kramer yarns up and down you pull from the top if the label is printed like this horizontally you pull from the left and it ends up being the same the same end okay so a skein of yarn does not need to be wound at all unless you want to and sometimes i actually do wine skeins because you know what i just demonstrated like you're looking for the end and sometimes you pull the end out i'm not going to do it you pull the end out and you end up with what's called yarn barf a big massive yarn that didn't come out like you probably hoped it would and then i end up winding it into a cake just so i don't have to wind the yarn barf by hand okay so for the second wind do you put the cake in a bowl or a bag or something how do you wind it the second time without the cake flopping everywhere and this is a good question because if you're winding the second time from the outside of the cake it is going to flop all over the place and you can just drop it into a grocery bag or something and let it flop around that would drive my dogs crazy and they would think that there was a live animal in there but i always pull from the center of the cake and it just sits there and i wind from the center of the cake and then after all of this ends up back on there with a second wind i pull it off and it's a much looser cake okay are you able to knit from the center of the cake yep it's a normal cake of yarn when you wind the second time from the cake do you pull from the middle or the outside or does it matter i i just explained that i pull from the center of the cake uh someone commented i just wind slowly so it doesn't get tight now this is um this is kind of a your mileage may vary kind of a thing but i noticed that when i have the swift when i'm winding fast because i really crank it and you know get upper body workout on one arm when this thing's really going you get the momentum of that and you get less stick from your swift if if it's really going so i'm not sure winding slowly is going to make any difference and regardless of how quickly you're going the yarn is always going to like kind of be over itself a little bit on certain parts and so it's going to give it a little bit of a tug and that's what makes this or a little resistance and that's what makes this tighter so i don't know that winding slowly would make a difference with my setup winding twice is what makes the big difference in my setup okay so are you using the swift both times or are you hand winding the cake the second time so i use the swift the first time when the yarn is in hank form put it over that and wind it to there and then the second time from the cake to there right so this person is actually thinking that i work way harder than i actually do i don't take the cake wind it back into a take the cake wind it back into a hank and then put it back on the swift i just work straight from the cake the second time okay what is the difference between a hank and a skein i thought they were the same and i think i covered that a hank is a big loop of yarn like this that you could knit from it in this state you would end up i mean most likely unless you're a very careful person with no pets you're going to end up with a mess and so it's good to wind it either by hand or or on a swift and ball winder and a skein is something that comes already wound and i only have a skein here you can get a ball of yarn that is a center pole ball of yarn that you pull from and i have a video called hank skein cake ball i think and i can link to that video as well for more of an explanation of how yarn is put up that's what they call it put up last question so you want the yarn to stretch or you don't i'm a relatively new knitter and this is a this is great information to have no you don't want the yarn to stretch if it's super tight in the cake and super stretched in the cake um it it could change the yarn to make your gauge different even if you swatched before it was stretched like that it could and so many things could happen and you could knit up a whole sweater and then wash it and have the yarn like relax back to its natural state and end up with a little tiny sweater or hat or gloves or whatever it is you're making so it's not a good idea to have the yarn stretched and one thing another thing that came up that i didn't put on the list is people were asking me is it okay to wind a whole bunch of yarn way before you're going to use it and i say your mileage might vary you do you but i do not i wind yarn when i know i'm ready to cast on and i'm ready to go with it if it's a big project like what i have here i haven't even wound on the yarn because there's you know hundreds of yards in each one of these balls it's going to take me a while or each one of these cakes it's going to take me a while to get through all of this so i might as well just wait to wind the rest of it until i need it and i know this gets to be inconvenient because people who are going to yarn stores want to get all the yarn they buy wound while they're there especially because a lot of times the the employees of the yarn shop will do it for you but it does make it handy to have your own ball winder and swift at home so that you can do this yourself okay i think i answered all the questions oh my goodness it ends up being like 100 more questions in the comments here on youtube i am so sorry i'm really really trying to be clear with why i wind yarn twice um if you got it yay yay we got it we got there together um but that is it for this video i hope i've explained this well good luck [Music] hello

Channel: VeryPink Knits

Views: 33,194

Rating: 4.9643493 out of 5

Keywords: knit, knitting, verypink, verypinkknits, verypink knits, very pink

Id: cODYC9-2aRY

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021