I’ve been sharing some images lately of the reskeined work getting ready to ship, and a few folks have asked about the ‘why’ of reskeining, so I thought I’d talk a little about it here.

During the hand painting process, things can get very messy. By reskeining, I am making sure that my skein has already been through a swift and skein winder, so my customer is going to get a nice, neat skein that unwinds easily when they’re ready to start working with it. It’s like a last-stage quality check. Everyone has had a skein that turned into a hot mess when they tried to unwind it, and it’s never fun.

Reskeining a hank also provides a better understanding of how the colours will actually sit beside each other in the knitting. For example:

This is a fantastic shot for showing my original intent when I was hand painting. The skein, unwound looks like this:

Reskeined, it looks like this:

And compared against the original photo, you can still see the connection:

I don’t reskein if the hank is already nice and neat and ready to ship, but if I see any rogue threads or think that the skein is likely to give trouble later then I absolutely will rewind it :)