Swift!

I’ve been neglecting you, dear blog, but I have a good excuse. My recent health issues have been getting in the way. I’ve been anything but swift lately. But I hope that it is pretty much over now, and I can soon resume crafting so I have something to blog about.

In lieu of knitting or quilting, I have been putting some of my time to good use. I’ve been winding skeins of yarn into centre-pull balls, using my new swift. My dear husband made this for me from some left-over bits of wood, a little hardware, and some clever design work.

And here it is:

It has adjustable pegs to account for different skein sizes, and it rotates on a lazy Susan base. Here is a close-up shot of the base:

You can see the rubber feet that keep it from slipping from the table when I pull on the yarn.

As you can also see from the above photo, the swift comes apart for storage. The four arms come off, and the pegs come out of the arms. The arms are numbered to make it easy to set it up again, to account for minor variances in manufacturing.

Here it is with a skein of yarn on it, so you can see what it looks like in use.

So, now it is far easier to change this:

into this:

I do wind balls by hand, so it is still a slower process than it would be with a proper ball-winder, but this is a whole lot better than trying to hold the skein across my knees and keep it untangled while I wind. That was becoming very frustrating. I am finding that more and more of the yarn I buy comes in skeins, so having an easy way to wind them is very helpful.

P.S. The yarn pictured above is Sea Wool hand-dyed sock yarn, from Fleece Artist.