It's the most wonderful time of the year and other updates...

[which_chick]

Welcome to October, the mid-Atlantic not gonna turn the heat on yet month. The goal here is to not turn the heat on until it gets to November. No fires, for those of you who heat with fire. No heat pump or electric baseboard, no oil, no heat. Baking or roasting in oven, doing laundry, etc are OK and you can have heat in the bathroom ONLY and ONLY when you are showering or bathing. Can you make it to November? LOL. I am winning so far. The house is... about 58F.

Also it's time for Stayman Winesaps, the most wonderful apples of all. If this is an option for you, you might get some. The time is now.

Earlier this year, the owner of the barky dogs who lives in the hayfield copse where I ride my horse (there are three barky dogs, elderly labs, who are mostly secured but sometimes NOT secured and the not-secured times are random and unexpected which I do not love and neither does my horse) offered up an unwanted ball winder for yarn. I accepted the unwanted ball winder, which is a hand cranked kind of oscillating post thing. I tried it out last night and folks, this thing is da bomb. It's amazing. Super easy to operate and also very fun. Two thumbs up. Would only be better if I had a swift to go with it.

Comments

[adafrog]

A swift?

[which_chick]

In fiber crafts, once you get into fancy yarn (hand dyed, small-batch, blah blah blah, not the red heart acrylics that one buys at WalMart) it comes in things called hanks which are big twisty coils of yarn you can make on a niddy-noddy (if a handspinner). They're pretty. Like, super pretty. And they're more squishable than balls of yarn. They display well. Hanks are just... nice for people selling yarn.

Hanks are the way things are for a lot of the fancier yarns out there. Get yo'self some Cascade 220, you're gonna be playing hanks. Get yo'self some nice gradient sock yarn, it's gonna come in hanks. Hanks is a thing. (If you are not sure what a hank is and how it differs from a skein or a ball or a cake, you can read this and be enlightened. Or not.) ANYWAY you can't knit from a hank unless you live a very different life than I live.

At my house, Squeaky, the young (under a year) cat is very interested in fiber arts of all sorts. Hanks + Squeaky is not a good combo. Also, in reality, hanks are a marketing tool because they're a pain in the ass for doing anything with your yarn other than looking at it and squishing it a bit.

Anyway you get your hank and you untuck the end and untwist the thing into a big loop of yarn coils. And then you put it (ideally) in a swift and expand the swift (works kinda like an umbrella) to tension the coils so that they don't tangle and then you use your swift (which spins round and round to uncoil the yarn) and your ball winder to make a cake (not a ball) of tidy center pull goodness that you can knit from. I do not know why the ball winder makes cakes and not balls. I cannot help the dipshit terminology of fiber arts. But yeah. The kind of umbrella-y thing that holds the big loop of yarn coils properly tensioned and spins round and round so that you can get from "attractive but useless hank" to "tidy, useful cake" without snarling two hundred yards of skinny sock yarn, that thing is called a swift. Here is a video of using a swift and ball winder to get from decorative hank to useful cake. She talks a lot and has a fancier ball winder than mine, but it's pretty good about illustrating the whole mess from start to end.

[adafrog]

Very cool video, thanks.

Squeaky, the young (under a year) cat is very interested in fiber arts of all sorts. Hanks + Squeaky is not a good combo.
lol I'll bet not!