16 oz of yarn is a lot of yarn.

This is going to be one of those posts where I do something crazy and take lots of pictures so you can laugh at me.  I swear, when I started this seemed like a great idea.  But getting to the point, anybody remember this picture?

That is a sixteen ounce skein of yarn - a whole pound. It is Mountain Colors Weavers Wool, which is very nice and squishy and will be a very nice sweater.  (To be specific, it will be Chocolate, the Sweater in my ebook).  It does create the problem of how to wind it tho.  See, this is how a normal skein of yarn looks on my swift:

This is how a sixteen ounce skein looks:

Problem number one, right there.  Problem number two:

I think it's afraid of that much yarn.  So I decided to make it bigger with a paper plate with a hole in it and a paper towel tube:

The little yarn guide thingy was too close in, so I tried to guide the yarn with my hand, but that largely resulted in the yarn getting caught in the gears of the ball winder.  Also, when it gets to spinning the paper plate acted like a little wing and tried to launch the whole assembly across the room.  So I decided to take off the paper plate and use the yarn guide:

It... kind of worked?  Sort of maybe?  But you see that blob at the bottom?  Yeah that just got bigger and bigger until I had to put the little yarn guide down again so it wouldn't put the yarn down in the gears again.  But I kept winding until it looked like this:

That's about when the gears in my ball winder started to skip.  Bad sign, that.  Unfortunately the swift still looked like this:

I finally had to take it off the ball winder and finish by hand, which was tedious, but at least I didn't have to worry about breaking my ball winder any more.  I don't think I'm going to get that paper towel tube out of there until the yarn is used up, but it is all wound now, without cutting or anything, as you can see:

It's also bigger than my kid's head.  The really sad part?  I have another one of these I'm going to have to figure out how to wind.  Beam me up, Scotty!