Stanwood Yarn Ball Winder

THE REVIEW

If there is one experience that unites knitters (beyond the actual act of knitting) it is the winding of yarn balls. If you are like me, you probably started knitting with acrylic yarns that technically don’t need to be wound. I always wound them anyway, as I discovered that it resulted in less mess while knitting. As I got more addicted to knitting, I made my way up the fiber chain, purchasing hanks of yarn from my local yarn store. The first time they offered to wind my balls for me, I was an idiot and I declined. I got home and promptly made a hot mess of the gorgeous yarn I just purchased. I eventually managed to get it all untangled and wound, but it was painful, required several hours, and altered my relationship with that yarn.

From there, I started having the stores wind the yarn, and then I learned a little truism about natural fiber yarns: they have memory. It is for this reason that we are not supposed to wind our balls until we are getting ready to use them. For a long time, I was a few-minutes-a-night kind of knitter, so it could take me months to get to a cake of yarn. Not ideal, especially if you are like most knitters and keep a deep stash of yarns or store partial skeins.

There are YouTube videos out on the web that have some great examples of hand-winding skeins, and most knitters have a variety of tips and tricks to aid in hand-winding yarn. You can create a center-pull ball, use the back of a chair, make your kid hold your yarn so it doesn’t tangle, etc. And, for a long time, that’s how I got along. Then I shifted from addicted knitter to obsessed knitter, and I was suddenly winding 8 – 10 skeins every month. At that point, finding a way to keep the skein from getting tangled was the least of my worries: I experienced hand and wrist pain when hand-winding such large amounts of yarn, it took 20-30 minutes to wind 400 yards of yarn, and keeping our cats distracted for that amount of time was a lost battle. It was time for a ball winder.

When I did a web search for “ball winder,” I was surprised at how few options I found: it looks like the market is primarily owned by a couple of brands, and there are three basic levels of ball winder. There’s a fairly inexpensive ($20-$30) version that is primarily made of plastic; there’s a mid-level version that contains some metal parts, and there’s a commercial level that is fully automated and generally made of wood. If you are shopping for a ball winder, double-check how much yarn it can wind: we found a “medium” and a “large” option. While the medium is generally enough for most balls, if you buy oversized skeins (think Miss Babs) or super chunky yarns, you may prefer the large option. This review is for a large mid-level ball winder.

INITIAL REACTIONS: I was really excited to open the ball winder. It came in a white box, and there was a little assembly required. No printed directions came with it, but a quick search on the web got me sorted. Total time to assemble (including the web search and watching the videos) was approximately 10 minutes. The weight feels good in my hand, and the screw component on the bottom of the ball winder (which lets it attach to surfaces, such as tables) moves easily, and it fit my kitchen island easily. The action, without any yarn on it, it really smooth and noiseless.

THE TESTS:  

• General Usage: It took me a couple of tries to get the yarn wound through the primary and secondary arms, and that was after watching more YouTube videos. However, it quickly became an acquired habit, and now I have no challenges with getting the yarn setup. Attaching it to the bobbin was a bit more complicated for me than I found in the videos: I found that I need to place a length of yarn through the center slit, wind it once or twice around the bobbin, and then place it back through the bobbin for the best results. Even then, I occasionally have it slip off the bobbin during the first one or two spins of the ball winder.  Winding the yarn itself is really straight-forward, as long as you have it pull cleanly through the primary, guiding arm (so that it doesn’t interact with the winding arm). It creates really nice cakes that are not firm but not tight, and I am consistently able to get the label inserted into the middle of the cake when I pull it off the bobbin.

• Ball Winder with Yarn Swift: I will just say that using a swift with a ball winder is a purely magical experience. My best tip here is to make sure that the swift is stationed at least three feet away from the ball winder (so that it enters the primary, guiding arm cleanly) when the swift is fully extended. Also, make sure that the swift has easy, clean movement. For me, this means leaving the yarn on the swift a little loose so that the swift turns more easily. This actually impacts the ability of the ball winder to move quickly, and it also impacts the amount of force you need to use to move the winding arm.

• Ball Winder without Yarn Swift: Sure, even some nice yarns come pre-wound into oval balls, but I really prefer knitting from a cake. For this test, I setup the ball winder and put the yarn balls on floor. What I discovered is that I had to hold the yarn significantly in front of the primary, guiding arm and very far away from the winding arm, or the winding arm would get tangled into the base and/or gears of the ball winder. Detangling yarn from those parts of the ball winder is a miserable experience, and potentially damages that section of the yarn. In a worst-case scenario (which I came close to, but never actually hit), it could be necessary to disassemble key parts of the ball winder to get your yarn back out.

What I love the most about the ball winder is that I typically wind a ball in under five minutes now (usually close to two minutes of actual cranking on a 400 yard skein), and I have no physical pain from it. Center-pull and outer-edge pull balls both knit up easily, and the cakes do not collapse as I get toward the end of the yarn, so I’m not detangling knots from the last ten yards of yarn now. My one cautionary note is that I have to be careful that I keep yarns away from that winding arm and pay attention to the tension in the crank; that tension is my first indicator that yarn is not pull through smoothly.  For the price (at mid-level, this was about $50), this ball winder is a great value to anyone winding up more than three skeins per month.