When I was learning to knit and crochet, I was taught to roll up extra yarn into a ball. Generally, you started with a small nest of yarn and wrapped more yarn around, changing directions every so often so it came out more or less round. Inevitably, I would drop the ball, it would roll across the floor, the cat might help its progress, and I would have to wind it up again. When I was older, I obtained a “new wool winder” which winds yarn from a hank into a cake-like structure, but was wonderful because the cake sat still and yarn could be pulled from the center. It did not work so well with small amounts of yarn, and I had to go and find the machine and a place to secure it to use it. Fast forward many years (better just skip, because there is quite a lot of time from then to now), and I was learning about spinning on a dealgan (a Scottish type of drop spindle), and the presenter in the video said the newly made yarn was wrapped around the spindle in the same way as for a nostepinne. What? The resulting cop of yarn could come directly off the spindle and the yarn could be pulled from the center. Hm. New rabbit hole. Nostepinne is a word for a fancy stick. I used a 1” dowel, which worked just fine the first time, but you really don’t even need a stick. A rolled up piece of paper will also work (especially if the cat is comfy on your lap and you can’t reach your stick, but there is a handy piece of paper).

Here is a video: https://youtu.be/Fk6PVyzV6BY

I’m sharing because I really found this way of winding to be life changing. And it is so simple.

On a separate note, Adobe Premier now will make captions from my audio automatically. So that saves me a bit of typing. It still needed editing because “nostepinne” is not in its transcription vocabulary. Shocking. The video isn’t fancy because I’m still learning the software.