Tips on Unwinding a Skein of yarn with a Ball Winder and Swift

hello there my name is Kyle we're here at paradise fibers today and I am going to show you how to unscathed or yarn using our swift of course the Paradise fiber super Swift a lot of people run into a lot of trouble since really easy to get caught up or tangled I'm hopefully going to show you some pointers and some tips and tricks that will make your life a lot easier as you unwind this so the first thing you're going to want to do most yarns and high end yarns are going to come to skein of course they're going to be twisted up and all pretty as soon as you unscanned it you're going to want to if you can lay it out on a table great or using your hands you're going to want to pretty much find all the ties on it this particular brand only has one and you can see it's right there they're very hard to miss you'll see that it's the same color as the yarn so that's typically on most skeins that's the one that you'll actually end up cutting all the other ones will be just a solid cotton thread or just some undyed thread and they'll have a couple ties here and there around this game so the number one thing that you want to do when you unscanned your skein here is find a tie it doesn't matter what tied is find a tie and make sure that all the yarn is going in the same direction and that none are coming back over that time I'll show you an example of that really quick it will look like something's not right so you can see on the camera there hopefully that these two threads are coming over the tie and if you put that on your swift and start spinning you will be in a world of hurt it's almost impossible to fix that it's an absolute nightmare so you're going to unscanned it find that tie and you're going to make sure that they're all going in the same direction now if you go to one of those ties and they're all in the same direction you can see that tie all the way around your skein and you know it's good just go ahead and take your hands without letting go of it bring it to the outside make sure it's nice and even all the way around you don't have any loops or not anywhere and now we're going to go ahead and put this on or swift so we'll come over the super Swift here we'll put it on after you put it on but I like to do is tighten it up if you don't tighten it up you can see there's a lot of slack it likes to get hooked on certain things and it's just a lot easier to work with when it is nice and taut so we'll tighten it up quite a bit you don't need a lot of tension on it but make sure it's not going to go anywhere always double-check your work because it is a nightmare if you get caught go back to that knot and that string that you were originally looking at make sure everything still stayed where it's supposed to now what I like to do is you can see there's some twists we don't want those at all we want this to look pretty on here so the first thing I like to do is untwist everything before I cut anything just to to double-check so I'm going to follow this twist and all you got to do is grab it twist it and I like to bring it up a little bit because you can see that you'll find a couple more twists so there's another twist here so we're just going to flip it the right way spread it out a little bit on our swift and that you know that's one thing that I do like about our Swift is it does have these tall dowels so not only can I hold big skeins but if you're using a small scale like a 50 gram skein like this you can you know take advantage of that long peg and Strait and spread it out across that peg so it's going to make your life a lot easier as we're winding here okay so that looks pretty good to me you can see now everything is pretty much flowing in the same direction there's no twists in it I've got my tie right between these two uprights here great time to double check because once you cut it you can't really go back so I don't have any other ties anywhere else so what I'm going to do is I'm going to snip this tie you should just be able to pull it out like so and I like to find both ends right off the bat looks like here's the other end I cut okay so you can see right now that this strand is on the inside of our skein we don't want that you can see where that's going to cause problems as you're pulling along it's going to be pulling and you have a greater chance of it snagging some yarn and jumping up off your post there we don't want that so all we're going to do is flip it like we were when we were straightening our yarn out we're just going to flip it the other way so our yarn our goal here is to have our yarns be pulling from the outside of our scheme so we're just going to keep flipping it and I like to pull along with it to make sure that it's going to stay on track we have one more here alright so everything looks good it's neat you have a couple options here with this end I like to just let it hang if you find it's getting caught on anything mm-hmm you can bring it into the center and wrap it around one of these posts and it will kind of stay out your way but it doesn't hurt anything for it to be out here so before I put it on the ball winder I give it one full rotation of the swift to double check everything and you can see there that it's coming off very easily and whether it's coming from the top or the bottom since we spread these out it's going to it's going to be no problem at all a lot of times at the end of the tie there's you know another knot you can just cut that off if you want to keep it you can it'll you'll have to cut it anyway because this is actually going to be where you're going to start knitting from because these are all going to create Center pole balls from there we're going to put it on to our ball winder there's a couple tricks here to that you're going to want to keep in mind this is probably the most popular ball winder that's sold out there this Center cone does come off it twists off so make sure if you don't apply tension on this you could run into a couple problems and I'll show you the best way to apply some tension I like to loop mine all the way across and all the way over to the other side because if you lose this you're basically going to have to rescan your entire thing and start over from the get-go because like I said these are Center pool balls you're going to want to start knitting from this end so I like to put that in the center make sure it gets caught there and we'll start winding up all of our slack till we get to her Swift okay so now it's at the Swift this is not a yarn tensioner right here this is just pretty much a yarn keeper it's not going to apply any tension on your yarn a lot of people and it's true that if you apply too much tension you're going to stretch your yarn out and you're going to lose the bounce we don't have to apply a ton of tension we just want to pinch it with our two front fingers and make sure there's some sort of tension on here because if you don't what will happen is you can see this kind of rotates on an axis at 45 degrees if you get crank and really quick if there's no tension on this it's got a tendency to just Boop and pop right off the top and then you're in big trouble so make sure you do get a little bit of tension on your fingers and the other reason I like to hold it with my fingers up front here is if for some reason you run into any issues with the Swift it's quick to stop this so we'll go ahead and wind this on really quick if you have tension on there and you've done everything I've showed you on the Swift you can you can get cruising really quickly you're not going to get snagged on anything you can see it's coming off really easily and if you have not seen our Swift or ball winder video before I'm going to show you kind of a neat feature on this particular Swift that I really like and if you see and you're probably wondering what all those pegs in the center for the for small pegs are actually what hold on the arms so it's collapsible stores in a nice little Muslim bag that you get with it okay so you can see how nice this ball is we did have any issues with the Swift nothing got caught nothing got snagged so I'm just going to pull this Center I like to pull it all the way up make sure I don't lose that end and you're just going to slide this off nice and slow and you can see how beautiful that ball turned out and we didn't have any issues no yarn was going back on itself the Swift never got snagged or caught and some is I'm going to show you what this big peg is for so on the Swift this peg here is actually we put on to use as a scanner so all you're going to do is just tie up overhand knot nothing fancy you don't have to do a surgeon's knot tie that on there I'm going to set this on the ground for now but this if you are you know hand Dyer oh man oh my knot came undone guess we'll double knot it just to be sure okay Han Dyer or you spin your own yarn or for some reason you want to take one of your balls and put it back into the skein all you got to do is use this tall peg and that's your handle so most scanners you see are actually perpendicular to the ground this one obviously we just doubled our Swift as a scanner it works great it does the job it's not its primary use since the obviously used as a Swift but I love this feature on ours and you can see that you can really get cruising here and the nice thing is when we talked about having all of our yarn come from the outside and aligning everything it's kind of doing that right now it's winding it from the inside to the outside so when you are done you can just put it right back on to the ball winder wherever your tie is you're going to know that one strand is going to be coming directly from the outside of the skein we are almost done here so you're you're most likely going to run into a lot of problems with the lace weight stuff and you'd be placed up some hundred percent wool yarn that likes to stick to itself that's where you're going to have the issues and that's where it's going to be really important that you make sure you follow all these steps that I've shown you in this video because if you don't you're going to have a lot of problems it's going to get stuck on the swift it might get caught so make sure you follow those steps so I you are putting it on to your Swift make sure the ties are still intact all of your yarns going in the same direction before you cut them once you cut them you find your end piece and you pull it by your hand make sure it's coming from the outside if it's not coming from the outside all you got to do is flip it around it's very easy to do that if you have to take off some of the tension you can but make sure it's coming from the outside and then you're good to go ready to start winding up on your ball winder thank you for coming and watching our video today here at paradise fibers if you have any questions feel free to call us or email us anytime at Paradise fibers comm our phone number is eight eight eight three two zero seven seven four six and if you decide you want to Swift this is our maple version we also have a new special edition in walnut you can also find those on our website glad you made it this is kyle of paradise fibers signing off

Channel: Paradise Fibers

Views: 54,281

Keywords: ball winder, ballwinder, royal ball winder, yarn swift, yarn winding, yarn skeining

Id: ardXY3PJvrg

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2013