Finally. No wonder those forget-me-nots seemed to take so long. They did! Although, if I had chosen the right needle size from the get-go, it would have helped a lot, as I wouldn’t have had to knit three socks. I can finally start my first pair of Monkeys.

I had a dickens of a time winding up my Woodland yarn yesterday afternoon. I’ve been thinking that the green laceweight yarn was at fault, winding into a too-tight ball, but no. I’ve found that there’s some sort of problem with my poor swift, and it’s no longer turning with the ease that it should. I got a number of revolutions into winding up the sock yarn, and it was quite difficult to make the swift turn. It should be easy. But no, there was way too much tension on the yarn, and it was winding into an impossibly tight ball, stretching the yarn much too far. This’ll never do.

I removed the partial ball from the winder, and rewound it. That looks better. You know what this means? It means that I have to unwind the yarn from the swift manually, spread it out across the floor so that it won’t tangle, then go back to the winder and wind that bit up.

It took forever to get anywhere.

Then I realized that I wasn’t putting enough tension on the ball—it was huge and I still had a fair amount of yarn left to wind—so I once again removed it from the winder, and rewound it, putting a little tension on the yarn with my hand. Tedious, but it made a much more realistic ball: one that wasn’t wound so tightly that it damaged the yarn, yet wasn’t so loose that it would fall apart when looked at askew. I finished pulling the yarn off the swift, scattering it across the floor, winding it, and at last got a finished ball.

The only good thing with all this is that I got to see all those glorious colors go streaming by. The yarn is fairly dark, so unfortunately you can’t really see the glorious colors in this hank. Here’s another photo looking at it from the top. Does that help?

The worst part about the swift misbehaving is that I don’t trust it with the Cashwool. I wrote to the manufacturers. Hopefully they’ll have a clue how to fix it. Soon. Keep your fingers crossed. I have a strong need to get that laceweight wound up so I can swatch the for my mystery stole.

The market bag is almost done. Just need to weave in the rest of the ends.