Wool Winder

I find shop bought "balls" of wool very hard to crochet with. 

They don't roll, and due to their shape I find the wool doesn't naturally unravel- I have to pull at it to loosen up enough for the next few stitches.

This isn't great for fast or smooth crochet; nor is it good for my hands or arms.

A lovely round ball that would be free to roll is so much nicer to work from.So as I've already blogged- I bought a Wool Winder. And here it is in use.

Unfortunately, and rather stupidly, I didn't actually research it that well before buying.

I thought it was going to be able to wind me lovely round balls.

It turns out that it doesn't.

As you can see from the photo below, there is quite a large  middle to them, where they wind onto the spindle.

 

Winding is quite fun to do, but can be quite a staticky (is that really a word?!) business- especially if winding acrylic yarn and the winder is clipped onto a plastic table!

But it does have a rather annoying fault. 

The metal yarn guide positions the wool in the right place for winding. This however does not clip into  place as suggested in the instructions, and very annoyingly it moves. This makes smooth winding virtually impossible.

However a bit of blue tack stuck underneath has pretty much sorted this problem though!

This is what the balls look like once wound- after removing from the winder the hole in the middle does tend to disappear a bit, and the resulting ball is quite solid.

 

Having used these balls now to crochet with, I definitely think they are better than the shop bought pill shaped balls.

I'm glad I bought it- I'll be using it to rewind all my new balls of wool from now on.

And it has quite a cute retro look to it- don't you think?!