WINDING WEFT YARN FOR DYEING CONTINUES

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

As I continued winding skeins of this 60/2 silk, winding it from my Goko skein-winder to my LeClerc skein winder got a bit easier. I still couldn’t, most of the time anyway, simply wind the LeClerc skein winder and have the yarn freely come off the Goko. Instead I pulled the yarn off the Goko by hand, piling it up on the floor and over my legs. Then I wound the loose yarn onto the LeClerc. That would give me about 5-7 yards of silk.

HICCUPS

Sometimes when I came to the end I would find the yarn feeding smoothly off the Goko for a little bit, or with only slight hiccups that I could deal with easily with my left hand. The really tough hiccups that forced me to stop happening just a little less frequently. So things were easing up.

What causes these hiccups? I don’t know. The yarn gets caught by the yarns further inside the skein. And I don’t know what causes that either. In any case, this was going much more smoothly than some of my earlier frantic unwinding some of my dyed skeins of silk organzine. So I was grateful for that.

SKEIN TO CONE

When I finally finished winding off six separate skeins for dyeing—three for blues and three for reds—I decided to wind off the rest of the original skein onto a cone.

Now things got progressively easier until, when I hit about the 900-yard mark, the unwinding started going very smoothly. All I had to do from that point on was to turn the LeClerc skein winder and let the yarn coming from the Goko run over my left hand. Though I could feel tiny catches happening with some frequency, rarely did I have to use my left hand to undo a bad catch.

A BROKEN YARN

And then I ran out of yarn. But there was still a lot of yarn left on the Goko. I knew there was a broken yarn somewhere. I had seen the two individual ends periodically as I wound. So I knew this was going to happen. I couldn’t find the broken end in the skein. Fortunately, however, I had tied a contrast yarn to the other end of the skein itself before I started winding so that I found easily.

What worried me was………….am I back to slow winding off again?

Well I was, but only for a little while, maybe for 3 yards. Then everything went smoothly again until I had a total of 2,166 yards wound on the cone.

NEXT SKEIN?

I am now thinking that the next time I go through this I may just begin by winding the entire skein onto a cone and then making the small dyeing skeins from that. Just an idea for now. Part of this will depend on how unwinding the dyed skein goes. Stay tuned!

Related Posts:
That Badly Snarled Skein of Yarn
Disappointment

“Winding Weft for Dyeing Continues” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on March 23, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina