A swift?

One of the nice things about hand-dyed yarn is that it comes in skeins that allow you to see the colour variation along the strands. An unfortunate side of this though, is that you need to wind it into balls before you knit or crochet with it. To avoid making knots, you need to somehow stretch the big loop of yarn so that it's tight while you wind it. If you're someone who knits fairly fast and often finishes things (neither of which are true about me), you can probably justify owning a special contraption called a swift, specifically designed to do this.

In our house, my husband is the poor sucker who usually gets the job of holding his arms out for ages while I try to negotiate the ball winding business. But I think he's out of a job. (I'm sure he's very disappointed. Not.) Enter two child-sized Ikea chairs, the perfect size for stretching out the big loop of yarn, and small enough that I can wind from above which seems to help it unravel easily. I'm feeling rather clever!

So now I have two more balls of lovely hand-dyed yarn ready to be made into shoes for peanut (who is expected to arrive in less than 8 weeks...I need to get making! Fast!). And I've started.

Which is rather exciting, because due to a self-imposed rule requiring one thing to be completed before the next one is started, it means that the knitty bit of the Ishbel hat that I've been knitting forever is FINISHED!! It's currently blocking, but once that's done I'll show you some proper pictures.