Winding - winding - winding

Guess who?

Okay, so we had some fun with the photo shoot.  It's the only chance I'm going to have to be literally buried in these skeins, although I'm sure I'll feel like I'm buried for a while.

A big huge thank you to my friend Allison Harding for her assistance in the preliminary photoshoot.  She certainly had a vision for how to put this all together and I will always be grateful for her friendship, prodding and encouragement.  It's good to have a friend like Allison and I feel blessed to have people like her in my life.


So....all the yarns are here, I'll give you a quick look at all the yumminess:

 
I know you will want to know more about these yarns, and I will tell you more as we go on this journey together.

So now that the yarn has been photographed, it's time to get to work.  That means all this yarn needs to be wound into balls.  Do you have any idea how long it takes to wind 26 balls of yarn (yes...26)?
A long long time!

I had the wonderful opportunity to go over to Vashon Island for part of the weekend and hang out with my friends Myra and Dave of Vashon Pharmacy.   Myra is the proprietor of the "Yarnacy" a small section of the pharmacy that has been devoted to all things yarn and fiber therapy!

Myra hosts a spinning group at her house once a month, and while it's not actually spinning...I thought winding was close enough.

 If you look closely at this photo, it looks like the yarn has disappeared, but there is a black section of the yarn that blends in with the fire screen.

I elected to wind all of the yarn into center pull "cakes" because it keeps them all uniform and helps me in loading the frame that I use to manage all of this yarn.

I have elected to use a clothing rack that we got from the container store, as it's a bit more industrial than the one that I used the last time, and the bar is longer, so it's easier to hang the organizers from it.

The next piece of equipment needed is the organizers - I use closet shoe organizers,  I had the two I used on the previous project, but I needed one more. Try as I might, I could not find an exact duplicate.

So...here it is....all the balls wound up and loaded into the organizers.

I will confess...I had to do it twice.   When I was loading the yarns I loaded them in order of the way you read....from right to left.  Sounds reasonable right?  Unfortunately I knit from the left needle to the right needle, so had to take everything down and re-do it.

Glad I figured that out before I cast on!

The next post will explain the toes (you can see them on the coffee table in the back - yep they are all RED!