Winding Skeins

I only recently discovered how to successfully rewind skeins and balls of yarn into the most useful kind of ball. The kind that will unravel from the centre. It's great for crocheting on the move as it can be tucked neatly in a bag and used from there, and it's also great at home - no need for yarn holders or leaping across the room chasing a wayward escapee!

What better way to demonstrate this technique than with my lovely 'poppy' blue sky alpaca yarn, which has arrived in a skein.

First you need to carefully untwist the skein and open it out into a large loop. Then find something to pop this loop over. I tend to use my feet (around the back of a couple of dining chairs works just as well).

Then locate an end, these are often tied to keep them secure, and carefully draw it out and drape it around your thumb with the loose end over the wrist.

Pick up the yarn crossing your palm and begin to wind in a figure of eight around the thumb and first finger, gently freeing more of the skein whenever necessary. Do this about a dozen times.

Now pinch the yarn at the cross in the centre of the 8 and carefully draw it off your hand. Now place the cross onto your fingertip and carefully fold each set of loops around your finger. The loose end should be running down your finger and across your hand. This can be a little fiddly the first couple of times, but you'll soon be a pro.

Now wrap around to secure this. It will need to be 'firm' but not tight. Be sure to keep your loose end free of the newly forming ball at all times.

Once you have a bit more body to work on you can start altering the direction of the winding. Your goal is to create a roughly spherical shape.

At some point you will no longer be able to wind easily with the yarn on your finger. At this point transfer to a large crochet hook, or knitting needle, and carry on! Just be sure to keep your loose end free of the ball.

Eventually you will run out of yarn, tuck the outside end of yarn around some of the later loops to secure it, then remove the ball from the crochet hook and marvel at your creation! Give a tug on the loose end and the yarn will easily unwind from the centre. Enjoy!

Tunisian Blanket, Step 2: Design to Project

This week I'm going to talk through how I turned my blanket design into a 'pattern' and got started on the project. I am by no means an expert at this as it is my first large project. But I'm sure my mistakes will help prevent you lovely readers from doing the same things!

Ordering Materials

This was certainly the main stumbling point for me. I had no yarn in my stash of the same brand that I wanted to use for the blanket - as I decided I wanted something a bit bulkier than the DK bamboo cotton seen in the photos of the last blog. I ended up settling on Drops Paris yarn as it was bulkier, cotton, and I managed to find somewhere I could get it nice and cheap! I knew I would need a large amount of it. So I went ahead and picked the colours I would need and ordered a bunch of yarn.

I had no idea how much I would need. So I just grabbed 10 balls of the blues, and 5 balls of the other colours. Turns out this was nowhere near enough! Luckily when I realised this they still had plenty of stock from the same dyelot so it won't cause any problems.

If you already have a sample of the yarn you are going to use, then you can weigh your gauge swatch (we'll talk about those in a moment) and use it to figure out how much yarn you're going to need. Handy! It's always best to order all your yarn for a project at the same time. Variation between dyelots of the same colour can be enough to make your finished piece look a bit odd.

Materials arriving is always quite exciting. This is actually my second yarn order for this project. It even came in a mesh bag, which is going to be great for storage of future stash items.

Gauge Swatch

This is a really important part of all projects. It helps estimate yarn use, and allows you to check the weight/size of the final fabric. Even when following patterns it's important to do a swatch to make sure your project is going to end up the correct size!

Generally when doing a gauge swatch you would be asked to work up a 10cm x 10cm square and the pattern will indicate how many stitches/rows should be in that square. Many yarns come with this information on their labels - which is really handy.

As I'm making my own pattern, I didn't make a full 10cm gauge. I wanted to know how many stitches/rows would be in each of the graph paper squares on my design, because that's how I'll be working. I did still want to check the weight of the fabric though, so I had to work up a large enough swatch to test that. Using the recommended needle size (5mm) from the yarn as a starting point I worked up a small swatch.

And there it is! All measured up and sitting on top of the blanket. Now, what you can't see is that the blanket is actually worked up using a 6mm hook. The stitch size is almost identical as the 5mm swatch but the fabric is a bit more flexible. Which is what I was going for. I did try to take some photos to demonstrate this, but it really is something you have to 'feel'.

As discussed in the last blog post I know I want each small square of the graph paper on the pattern to be 35mm x 35mm, which means that each grid square will be 6 stitches and 6 rows. Rows on the pictures are fairly self explanatory, and a 'stitch' is the vertical bar and the horizontal loop to the left of it.

I don't own any of those fancy Tunisian hooks with the long piece of piping for very large projects. When I purchased my hooks I wanted something I could carry around easily! Now, there is no way I am going to fit a 2 metre wide blanket on a 30cm long crochet hook. This meant I had to divide my pattern up into strips. Luckily for me this was nice and straight forward. 35cm (ie. 10 grid squares) will fit nicely onto the hooks I have! So I just had to divide up the pattern into 6 strips of 10 grid squares and then crochet them left to right across the pattern. This only becomes relevant when working on the wave motif as the rest of the blanket is just horizontal stripes and will be the same across all strips (that's a bit of a mouthful).

Progress

Hopefully some of you are keen to see how the blanket is coming along. So here's a little pictoral update for you. The first stripe is complete! Here it is laid out on the floor...

... and here is a close up of the wave motif.

Time to start stripe 2!

Next time I'll put together a tunisian crochet primer covering all the techniques I have used in the blanket.