Gizmo Gift

There's a new member in my gizmo collection. It's a home-made swift or skein holder. I received it at the Neighbourhood House yesterday, as a bit of a surprise. I was there to borrow L's car and sort out keys for my evening quilting class. One of the key members of the craft group happened in. When she saw me she couldn't quite remember my name, but she excitedly started to describe something she had for me at home. It too was nameless at this stage. I gathered it had to do with winding wool--whether it was a warping board or a skein holder or something entirely different wasn't clear. The only way to solve the mystery was to see it. She was enthusiastic enough to drive home for it and bring it back for me. Here it is: Just the right size for my 2 metre skeins, low profile so it doesn't want to tip over and with fixed arms, so they don't want to collapse in. Having said all that, the skein I tried it on wasn't in the best shape to start with and I did have a few tangles to sort out. Overall: I love the home-made ingenuity of it and I'll happily give it another go. Better yet, the generous unexpectedness of the whole episode makes me smile.

More Equipment

I started this Blog with a photo of my living room-studio. What can I say . . . there's a lot of stuff there. It's interesting to see how different people respond to it. I guess it's not necessarily what you'd expect when you knock on the door of an ordinary-looking suburban town house. I contend that all that stuff is useful stuff and I enjoy having it there, though it would be nice if the clean up-fairy would keep it all in order for me. I'm afraid there is no clean-up fairy. I'm not going to comment on the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.

So, talking about stuff. Here's one more piece of vital equipment:

This is a swift. It's the partner of the niddy noddies I introduced a while back. I use a niddy noddy to make a skein. I use a swift to hold a skein for me while I unwind it. Usually I unwind a skein to make a ball of yarn. And, yes, there is a special piece of equipment to help me wind a ball of yarn. Not so imaginatively named as the niddy noddy or the swift, though. It's simply called a ball winder.

A swift has two exciting features

1. it holds the skein while I wind the ball of yarn. That sounds basic enough, but this is the alternative when I was away on holidays and didn't have a swift with me: . . . skein draped across the back of a chair--I didn't feel brave enough to commandeer two chairs in the coffee shop. I'm only half-way through winding and it's getting tangled already.
2. The four arms are variable in length, so it will work for lots of different length skeins. It takes anything from my smallest to largest skein. That's handy, given the limitations on how much stuff I can reasonably store.