As you perused the shop you may have noticed that our self striping yarns currently come in a variety of delivery styles. Some are in cake form, some are in skeins, and some are in balls. This is due to the learning process of dyeing self-striping yarns which has taken a good deal of trial and error to find what works best.
The initial process involved using exceedingly long hanks of yarn partitioned into sections and then dyed. With this process, the most practical delivery style was a cake from a ball winder. The hanks were much too long to be wound on a swift. The process turned out to be fairly inefficient and the resulting cake was not immediately recognizable as a self-striping yarn to most knitters and crocheters.
Our newest process allows the use of normal length skeins wrapped into sections and then dyed on a home-made apparatus similar in function to a warping board. Once dyed, the yarn would then need to be returned to skein form with the use of a niddy noddy. This worked fairly well though again not everyone who looks at a skein can tell what the finished fabric will look like.
However, winding the dyed yarn into a ball turned out to be the most easy and efficient way to remove the yarn from the apparatus it was wrapped on. The resulting ball is easily recognizable as a self-striping yarn.
Moving forward, all Super Stitchy self-striping yarns will be offered as a hand wound ball at no additional cost! We will be working on updating our product photos as we dye new batches of our previous self-striping colorways.