Special Handling

Yesterday I posted about yarns that are 'tender' and need special handling. 

This yarn is not tender but it still needs special handling.

Even though it was stored in a plastic bag, the bag was loose and during transportation, the coils of yarn around the cone loosened to the point where it was pretty much impossible to find the end of the yarn, and trying to unwind it would have turned into a nightmare of snarls and tangles.

In the end when I gently grabbed the snarl of loose coils and gently pulled them off the cone and onto the table, there really wasn't all that much in terms of yardage - certainly well under an ounce of this 16 ounce cone.

Stripping the loose yarns off the cone took less than a minute, the value of the yarn was very low and many minutes of my time (not to mention the frustration of trying to salvedge it) were saved.

I used to work with this quality of yarn all the time when I wove for the fashion designer.  In point of fact I bought this yarn from her when she decided to retire and close down her business.  So I knew what I was getting in terms of quality - and behaviour.

In order to keep the yarn well behaved I got a bunch of net scrubbies and kept them to put onto the base of the cone.  I cut them long enough to pull up over the cone for storage, but they need to be pulled down to the base or else there is too much friction and the yarn won't feed off without a lot of tension being applied to the yarn.

The scrubbies prevent the yarn from slithering down the cone and wrapping around the base so that as you are winding it catches and snags.  They are also quite elastic and as the diameter of the cone reduces, they simply shrink to accommodate the smaller size.

I finished winding the warp with this yarn with no problems. 

There are other things that can be used in similar fashion - old pantyhose, for example.

Currently reading More Bitter Than Death - remembered to look up the title of the Dana Cameron book I'm nearly finished.