As a serial crafter, I’m constantly making, and each project seems to inspire several more and so I’m always buzzing with ideas of things that I haven’t got time to make...
This project was inspired, both by my recent beta testing of the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter, and a serendipitous wreath I accidentally made several years ago when I was altering a Christmas jumper for my daughter.
It effectively makes the task of winding off your own jumbo knitting yarns using leftover stash yarns a real possibility!
I have a large cone of 4-ply gauge, cotton chenille yarn that I’m hoping should be perfect for this project. It was a bargain £6 purchase from a factory shop that was too good to pass by. I didn’t really have a project in mind when I bought it, which is why it’s been sitting in my wardrobe for the last 12 years. I’m not sure exactly how much yarn is on there, but I’m estimating that it’s well over 2 kilos.
The first thing I needed to do was to work out how long the yarn on my cone was. For a brief moment I contemplated winding off the full cone for a more accurate measurement, but I quickly gave up on that idea, knowing how much my back would complain afterward...
I can get a rough guesstimate of yardage by weighing it, guessing the weight of the plastic cone, subtracting that, and then weighing 10 metres to calculate the length of the whole. It’s the quickest method I can think of: it’s likely to leave quite a bit of waste yarn at the end, but I can accept that for the time and effort saved.
Calculating the length of yarn from an unknown cone
Using simple maths, I can work out approximately the length of yarn I have on any mysterious ball or cone. My yarn and cone weigh 2335g. I'm guessing that the plastic cone inside weighs maybe 60g, which leaves about 2275g of yarn.
I measured off and weighed 10m of yarn, without cutting it, and it came to 2.35g. From here I can work out how much 1g of yarn weighs -
10m / 2.35g = 4.2553m
So if I know that 1g of yarn measures 4.2553m, I can multiply that by my suspected weight of 2275g of yarn to get a rough idea of the length of the whole cone.
4.2553m x 2277g = 9,689m
So, I estimate that I have over 9.5 km of yarn. Wow, I'm glad I didn't decide to wind all of that off!
Several years ago I blogged about an extreme yarn that I knitted on my knitting machine. This was from the same batch of bargain chenille yarn that I'm working with today. I'd like to wind off enough plies to knit a similar gauge yarn, so I'm guessing that I need to wind it off into about 23 separate balls. Goodness! Thankfully this isn't going to take as long to wind off as that one took to knit!
I divided my estimated yarn length of 9689m by 23 to get just over 421m.
So all I needed to do now was to set the target length on the yarn counter to 421m and wind off 23 balls - simple!
Unfortunately, it seems that I wildly underestimated the weight of the large plastic cone inside all of that yarn...
It turns out that it weighed nearly 118g, rather than the 60g that I allowed, so unfortunately I only managed to get 22 balls, rather than the 23 I calculated for, but that’ll be fine.
Knitting from 22 balls of chenille yarn would very quickly result in a hot mess of tangles, knots and frustration, so I decided to split it and divide it into two big balls.
There were two reasons that I decided to split it in two - mainly because I wanted to use this lazy Susan and tray to put a little twist into my multiple strands (and I can only fit 12 on there), but also because I knew that if I didn’t split it, I would eventually have a 2kg ball on my hands. I really didn’t fancy having to hold that for too long...
Here’s a little animated gif of my makeshift set-up that I used to twist all of my yarns loosely together.
To start my ball off, I used a ping-pong ball wrapped in leader yarn that I usually use when I’m pre-chain plying. I knotted all of the ball ends onto the leader and then started wrapping. The yarn came off significantly smoother pulling it from the centre of the ball, rather than the outside. I briefly tried the latter but I soon learned that it was not the way to go. To hold my yarns together a little, I gave the lazy Susan a little kick every so often. I didn’t want a lot of twist, just enough to bring the yarns together and make knitting multiple strands easier later.
The twist built up from the ball downwards and so when enough twist had built up to make it resemble a loose yarn, I reached down to wrap it onto the ball and then carried on spinning the tray until the twist built up again.
I made a YouTube video that shows my technique for making an extreme knitting yarn here -
So here is my 2.2kg of extreme knitting yarn. I’ve got much more here than I need to knit a wreath with, so hopefully, I’ll manage to get a couple of projects out of it. Christmas is less than 4 weeks away so please check back for an update on my wreath...
Incidentally, if you're interested in how much yarn I had leftover from the remaining yarns once the first ball had run out -
This is what was left. It wouldn't be fair to use this as a test of the accuracy of the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter as I was hand winding it using a very unorthodox method, but I can tell you that the balls had between 1 and 20m left on them, with an average of 6.75m. That’s a discrepancy of between 0.2 and 4.75%. I’m sure that’s significantly better than I could have achieved by weighing alone.
Incidentally, I later wound it all together into one big ball as I was getting in a mess with two and the difference in length between the two balls was about 24cm.
That was extremely satisfying!
If you liked this article, you might be interested in some of my other spinning related posts -
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| Testing the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter Prototype |
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| Making Super Chunky Yarn from Crushed Velvet Fabric |
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| Update on my Extreme Knitting Yarn |
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