Winding

So now I have 36 skeins of nicely-dyed 30/2 silk ready to wind into cones/blobs/whatever, for the warping. 

Since I'm planning this warp to be wound with four warp threads per pass on the warping wheel, and want to be able to swap out single threads from the four-end package (to work in other colors, gradually), I have to be able to have as many cones ready as I have colors (there are about 12 separate kinds of green in this warp!).  I don't have bobbins, I don't have a spool rack, I only have about 14 kiwaku/itomaki and they're all full, and I was flummoxed. 

Then it occurred to me that I can wrap long paper 'quills' around the axle of my zakuri, and wind each 400-yard skein onto one of those.  At 400 yards each, the yarn packages will not be too huge, and I can more or less come up with an elongated egg-shaped winding package that will be able to roll around in a bowl or jar as I wind the warp.  I only need to have four going at once, so that should work.  The axle of the zakuri is not really tapered, so if I run into difficulties removing the yarn quills, I can try to use my tapered pirn winder, which *does* have a long, tapered spindle on it, though that would be much more work than it would be to use the zakuri.

Right now the nicest present I could get would be about 50 kiwaku, but that'd cost a lot!  Time and again I have learned that as old and primitive as it is, the zakuri is still a pretty fast and efficient tool for all kinds of winding. 

In any case, I'm going to try the paper-wrapped quill on the zakuri tonight when I get home.