new ball winder

I have a suspicion that this post will only be of interest to knitters or anyone else who likes to wind yarn. I could be wrong but if you are not a knitter consider yourself warned.

Sometime in the past year, I dropped my ball winder. It was a Knit Picks winder which was inexpensive, as most things from Knit Picks are, and it did its job but not in a particularly noteworthy way. The biggest problem with it was that I didn’t have a place to store it. It lived sort of in its box, on a shelf in my downstairs closet. I had to get it out every time and try to fit it back in its box afterwards, which never really worked. The lack of good storage is how it broke. I knocked the whole box off the shelf at one point and the ball winder fell out and the handle broke off. And that was it. No more ball winder.

My mother gave me a check for my birthday with the admonishment that I should not just put it in my bank account and spend it on groceries. It is almost as if she knows me! That is exactly what probably would have happened. I realized that a ball winder would be the perfect gift for myself because I had been hesitant to replace mine with the same, cheap, plastic one I had before. But the jumbo wooden ones that looked much sturdier are too expensive. I tried to convince my husband that he really needed to take up woodworking so he could make me one from the plans I found online but he wasn’t convinced. Also, he pointed out that it would probably cost more than $170 in equipment for him to be able to do that.

So I decided to find something sturdier but not as pricey. I asked around at knit night about which winders everyone had and someone mentioned the U-Nitt winder. This one has metal gears so it should last longer than the plastic ones out there but it is not nearly as expensive as the wooden one. I also thought it would take up less space than the wooden one, which would have the same problem as my old plastic one did. I went ahead and ordered one but I hadn’t take it out of the box until last night.

I found a place to hook it to a shelf in the closet. This will hopefully keep it from being knocked on the floor but I also think it could take a fall much better than the old one. It’s metal and quite sturdy. Also, when you wind a ball of yarn, the yarn guidance bar thingy (I don’t know what that is really called) goes around the bobbin instead of just staying one place. My yarn orbits the winder instead of just getting wound onto it! I think it looks kind of cool. I was so entranced that I had my son take a video of me winding yarn.

Just a note, that voice in the video is my son’s and we were both amazed to hear it because it has gotten so deep recently! Kids, growing up. Sigh.