Winding Time! (and a bonus yarn review)

So, after all my difficulties the other day trying to decide whether or not to wait until my winder came to wind the second skein for socks I wanted to make...the winder and swift came!

The swift is gorgeous. It's much larger than I expected somehow, but I think that's just because I hadn't been thinking properly. It's only as large as it needs to be to do its job, after all. Well, I put the swift together without even looking at the directions, it's that intuitive and beautiful. (Once it was together I did look at the directions just to make sure I got it right. =] ) The yarn winder was somewhat less intuitive, and I was panicking it was broken until I read the bit about how the yarn feeder (or whatever the metal doohickey is called) needs to be snapped into place. Ohhhhh...suddenly it all made sense.

To test my swift and winder combo, the first skien I wound was a red skein of Cascade 220 I've been using for the flower pins I've been making. I'd been knitting 'delicately' from the skein and re looping after I was done each flower...as you can imagine, it was a bit of a mess. But, with swift and winder to the rescue, I now have a lovely beautiful yarn cake! After winding that skein, I promptly wound all the windable yarn in the house....except for that second skien of sock yarn I'd been really really really wanting to knit. Why? Because I can't find it! Argh! It's not that my stash is that big, it's just horribly unorganized. I remember this had been in *a* bag, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what kind of bag or where. Not a good thing. On the upside, this gives me motivation to work on cleaning up a little more!

One interesting discovery in winding was the nature of my Organik yarn from The Fibre Company I bought at Purl earlier this fall. I had chosen three skeins all in the same colorway and they all looked the same. Unfortunately, each has a very different character when it comes to how it was spun. The first skein had a lot of little things that at first I thought were knots, but that were really just over twisted bits. Once I untwisted those, this was a very even skein. The second skein had some bits that seemed not to have been spun at all followed by places where the yarn was almost threadlike. The third skein was much like the second skein, but the unspun bits were even fatter and the thread bits were even thinner. I'm a little dissapointed. This yarn I bought for the lovely dye job. I've looked at the yarn on the company's website and I can't find the colorway I have; all the colorways Purl has of this yarn that drew me to it seem to be Purl exclusives. It also seems like (and I could be mistaken here) these Purl exclusive color ways are different sized skeins. Ravelry tells me this is a bulky yarn that gets 85 yards to the skein, where as my yarn says it's worsted and gets 100 yards...odd. Either way, 100 yards for almost $13 is a bit much to have these large variations in ply. I'd bought the yarn originally planning on knitting a Branching Out, and I'll probably still do that, but this probably isn't the best yarn for lace. If only it wasn't so beautiful!