Sock Tips on Saturday

In one of the Socktoberfest threads over on Ravelry, someone asked me about dividing skeins in half to knit both socks at once. (Did I say that I'm participating in Socktoberfest this year? No? Well, I am.)

It occurred to me after writing a big, long post over there, that it would be a good idea to share my trick here as well.

I first heard of the idea to use a scale for dividing yarn from the “Wendy Knits” blog. Here is how I do it whenever I am dividing a skein of yarn in half.

Necessary equipment: Kitchen scale – a digital one with the ability to display in grams works best.

Nearly necessary equipment: Ball winder – definitely easier if you have your own to use for this, but would be possible to wind by hand.

Optional equipment: A swift for winding the original yarn ball, but the process works just as well to divide a ball that was wound by your LYS.

Instructions for Dividing a Skein in Half

1. Take the single wound skein of sock yarn & weigh it. Don’t just go by the number on the ball band, because sometimes it’s off by a few grams.

2. Divide that number in half. This is your target number to have each half-skein weigh when you are done.

3. Make sure your scale & ball winder are set up near each other. You will have the yarn cake still set on the scale while you are winding the second yarn cake.

4. Taking from the center of the yarn cake, begin winding a second cake from the middle of the first one. (This is so that both cakes of yarn are wound in the same direction – it wouldn’t do to have your socks be reverse color pattern from each other.) I use my non-winding arm as a yarn guide by propping my elbow near the scale, to help the yarn come up straight out of the original yarn cake.

5. Keep an eye on the scale. When it starts to read within 5-10 grams or so of your target number, stop for a little bit & double-check how much the original yarn cake weighs. I like to stop & pick the yarn ball up, let the scale go to zero, & then re-weigh so that the momentum of the winding isn’t effecting the scale’s readout.

6. Wind more slowly from this point, until you reach your target number.

7. If you want to double-check before cutting, remove the new half-sized cake from the ballwinder & weigh it before cutting the yarn. As long as both cakes are within a gram or two of each other in weight, they should have about the same amount of yarn in each.

Here is a series of pictures illustrating what I mean. I've been meaning to write this up for a while, which is why these pictures are from last Fall. I use sandwich bags to hold each of my half-skeins of yarn after I’m finished dividing them. The second picture shows how the original yarn cake looks after the middle half has been wound to the other one. This is why I contain the halves in sandwich bags – they don’t stay as neatly together once the middle is removed. Plastic bags aren’t very “green” but I do re-use them as I knit up yarn, so at least I’m not adding to the landfill.



The yarn is "English Garden" by Scarlet Fleece, purchased at the Loopy Ewe. Yes, it has been wound for a year but I have yet to actually cast these socks on. Last Fall, when I started wearing my Summer of Socks 2007 socks, I realized my sock wardrobe was sadly lacking in black/grey to wear with black jeans, so pink/green/cream yarn suddenly wasn't a priority to knit up.

This trick also works for any other need to divide yarn in half, such as for mittens or gloves.

Cable Fixing

Some cable errors can be left in if it's a matter of a wrong direction crossover 20 rows down. When an error in a travelling cable interferes with going forward in the project, however, there's nothing to do but to fix it. This time, I decided to document the fix, in case it helps anyone else who runs into a similar issue.

I thought I had the Susie Hoodie cable chart memorized, but a four or five rows later, it became apparent that I had started to turn the outside cables back towards the middle two rows early. Oops!

Because the body of the Susie Hoodie is knit all in one piece, tinking back all those rows would be a LOT of stitches. (Not to mention how much of a pain it is to frog mohair.) Therefore, re-knitting just the offending cable sections was the solution.

I put stitch holders through the stitches below the first wrong sets, as extra insurance. For the correct stitches on the very edge of the sweater, a stitch marker of the plastic safety-pin type was the perfect solution to hold only 3 stitches. Then I undid just the stitches I would need to re-knit.

I normally prefer metal DPNs, but wooden ones are great for something like this. When working with only a very few stitches, they stay in place better on wood, & the needle is less likely to fall out.


I re-knit the stitches with the cable travel starting on the correct row. Once the cable closest to the edge had been fixed, I used a wooden DPN to hold all the correct stitches while working on the cable closest to the body of the sweater.

For the side of the sweater where the yarn was, I did go ahead & tink back the entire purl-across-the-cable section, & re-knit all 20-something stitches before resuming work on the sweater.

The cable fix was a bit time consuming to do, but considering how long it takes me to knit each row of the Susie Hoodie, I think I came out ahead by fixing it this way versus frogging 5 rows & re-knitting.