Ruthless Review of Amazon Electric Yarn Winder ~ Is This Winder Worth It?

If you're like me, you've been tempted by the idea of an electric yarn winder, but the price tag has always held me back. Maybe you too. I mean, why spend so much when you can just hand wind? But then I found this electric yarn winder for about half the price of the others I've seen, and I thought, okay, let's see if it's actually worth the money. Today I'll put it to the test and see if it's a game changer it claims to be. But first, if you like review videos, tutorials, and free patterns, be sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification bell so you don't miss out when I release new videos. Now, I am a very cheap person. I will put up with something that irks me to save a buck. I could never justify the price of an electric yarn winder, plus I was always skeptical of using them. I don't think I've ever hand wound a ball that didn't get tangled on itself at least once What happens when it's on an electric winder that doesn't stop like I would? Is it going to ruin my yarn? Well, we're going to find out. So I found this yarn winder on Amazon for about half the price of others that I've been seeing lately. I've got the link in the description if you want to try it out for yourself. But at about $40, it's still quite expensive, especially if it doesn't work well. My first impressions out of the box was it's not very compact. In fact, You actually screw on the tension yarn guide and then this pops on, so it's pretty bulky if you need to store it. You can take those off, but who wants to? Actually unscrew something. I don't know. So, the winder itself promises some impressive features. So according to the Amazon product description, it can handle 4 to 10 ounces of yarn and wind it into a neat ball in just one to two minutes. And it has a newly upgraded motor for faster winding and then three adjustable speed settings. It states on the Amazon listing that it has... Stronger yarn tension and reduces yarn vibration. Whatever that means. I'm hoping stronger yarn tension doesn't mean it's going to wind this ball super tight and stretch out the yarn. Hopefully that's not what they're talking about. It is supposed to reduce hand fatigue by us not having to crank the handle of a regular winder, which I can totally appreciate. So at the time of this review it had 4.4 stars with 27 reviews. So I'm going in hopeful. So I'm going to start with some leftover yarn from a skein. I'm curious to see how well it handles a loose ball. It states that the speeds are for the yarn weight you are winding and not just how quickly or slowly you want the ball wound. So I'm going to grab whatever end I find first on this skein. It looks like it's an outside end so we'll see Let's see how well this does with rolling yarn. So it goes through this little tension guide and then the actual metal guide above. You also see a little kind of rubber band thing that they give you in the middle of the post and that's supposed to help grip the yarn. Okay this thing turns on pretty fast but it's not too loud. Okay that did not go very well. So it looks like it came outside of the spring tension that it has, and it needs probably the ability to roll around, so I am going to drop it on the floor instead and see if maybe it being rolling around will work a little bit better. See how this one goes. It seems to be working a little bit better but again it's having difficulty if the yarn can't roll and it stops if it kind of has too much tension. So instead let's try a center pull ball. Maybe that will work better. So I'm gonna re-thread it. I've got the yarn ready to go. Let's see if this works better. And once again, we're getting caught. It looks like if we don't have three balls that's not going to work. So I'm sitting here holding it. Maybe that'll work better. Looks like if there's a little bit of a tangle in the ball, it's still going to get stuck. It's the power. The motor is just not powerful enough. to allow or pull that yarn out of there so let me speed this up a little bit i've given it a lot of slack to try to show what it's doing i'm slowing it back down now because you'll see i'm starting to get like a second ball going on here on this post if you can see that below i will I'm going to stop this so that you can see it a little bit more clearly, but you'll see I have kind of two cakes going on right now, which that's not ideal either. But let's keep going and just see what actually happens if we wind this whole thing. Maybe it will cover that and become one full cake, but that's probably not going to be great when we have to actually use it. So let's speed this up and finish it off. Okay, I'm nearing the end of the ball. So we'll see what happens when we run out of yarn and it looks like we tangle. So that's not ideal either. It kind of just got a little too crazy and flipped on itself a couple of times. So now I get to unwind that before I can finish this off, but I'm gonna also put it in here just to see what happens. And the winder gets super crazy. So let's look at what this looks like coming off of the actual post. And I am super not impressed. This is messy. This is crazy. This is not gonna work off easy. I am not liking this at all. But I'm not gonna give up yet. I'm gonna try still. The real test, a hank of yarn. I want to see what happens. If you ever hand wound a hank even with a you know winding hand winder, I can't think of the name right now, you know it's a pretty delicate process prone to tangles as it comes off of the umbrella if you don't set it up just right or if the hank itself has a loop or two that wasn't put on the correct side when it was twisted. So I'm a bit nervous about this because a tangle could mean ruined yarn and usually hanks are much more expensive than a skein, so I've been hesitant to trust an electric winder with this kind of task and I'm super nervous after seeing the skeins, but fingers crossed. Let's see how this goes. Don't mind my bed, this is the thinnest piece of furniture I can attach my swift hand winder, but let's try it and see what happens. And as I thought, it's not quite strong enough to pull the umbrella around and it keeps getting stuck. And if you'll notice, it has come undone from the tensioning guide. I'm just going for it. I want to see what happens. I'm just going to let this thing fly and who knows what will happen. You can see it's a mess. Look at this post. It is just the yarn. I picked a cheap one so that I don't ruin this yarn because this is not going well. Let's try it yet again and yet again it's falling off of the guide. It's kind of in the top guide there, but again the actual yarn is just kind of going all over the post. It is not working well at all. I don't know what to say. I am truly flabbergasted at this. Okay, now I'm gonna just wrap it around twice. Let's see, you know, or once. Let's see if that helps keep it there, like my poor skein or my cake. And that's not gonna work at all. I don't know what to say. Like, this is not happening. It's not, I don't see this working. At all in any fashion, it's a lost cause for me. So I had high hopes for this electric yarn winder, but unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations. The motor, even though it's improved, doesn't seem strong enough, especially when it's paired with a swift. And it requires a lot of tweaking to try to get the proper yarn cake, which I still had not mastered at all. I prefer something that works seamlessly out of the box without needing constant adjustments or figuring out how to make it work correctly, so this just isn't for me. Ultimately I've decided to return it because I know that it'll end up sitting unused in a cabinet I simply don't have the patience to fuss with it to make it work. For now, I'll stick to my tried and true hand crank winder which always gets the job done without any issues. If you've used this winder and love it, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Maybe there's something I overlooked. If you think you know how to make it work, I've included the link below in case you want to give it a try yourself. If you have another electric winder that works wonders, please let us know in the comments and maybe I might Go and purchase one of those higher-end electric winders, but for now, simplicity wins out. I'll be sticking with my hand crank. So don't forget you can go watch other videos of mine to see more craft gear reviews or free patterns. I am Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After and thank you for watching.