The method Chris Vail posted reminds me of the way I used to
separate four-ounce skeins of Persian wool for knitting.
There were two problems to solve: it's too much to do in
one session, and I had three cats.
I had a doorless doorway, in which I'd installed a round
curtain rod for the times when I regretted that some earlier
owner of the house had ripped out the doors between rooms.
(A door curtain is no help at all when you're trying to
catch a cat who doesn't want to go to the vet, but sooner or
later he would run into the bedroom, which still had a door.)
Across the room from this doorway there was a window with
old-fashioned sash lifts: two handles formed by two arches
of metal bolted to the sash. One of the sash lifts made a
handy anchoring point.
So I would comb out a few yards of yarn, drape it over the
round curtain rod, put the end of each strand into a
sandwich bag, and put a clothespin on the yarn through the
bag, to keep bag and yarn together. Then I put the skein
on a chair near the window and tied a bight of the yarn
around a sash lift. The bags would keep tension on the yarn
while I finger-combed the twist up to and over the curtain
rod. Then I would have to wait until the bags stopped
spinning and separated again, so if I had two skeins to
separate, I'd set up the other one in the other doorway.
Usually I just left the set-up dangling while I went about
my housework, and set the bags to spinning again every time
I noticed it. (With yarn bridging the living room, that was
fairly often.)
When all the twist was out of the unskeined yarn, I'd unclip
each bag, move it up on the yarn (with the strand pooling at
the bottom of the bag), then untie the yarn from the sash
lift and let out enough to put the bags near the floor,
repeat until twist extends to the curtain rod and the bags
are a comfortable distance from the floor.
I never at any time let the clothespin and the strand part
company, for if one loses track of which end went into the
bag last, you'll disturb the yarn into a tangled mess
finding it again. But if the bags are kept in a box and
disturbed as little as possible, one has days to get around
to skeining or balling the separated strands.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather)
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
where there is snow on the ground at the moment.
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